ABSTRACT
President Kim Dae-Jung has articulated productive welfare as "an ideology, as well as a policy, that seeks to secure minimum standard of living for all people." The theme of this paper is pro-poor growth, which is somewhat consistent with the idea of productive welfare in the sense that the people, who do not enjoy the socially accepted minimum standard of living, should be able to share the benefits of economic growth proportionally more or at least no less than the rest of the society. This chapter attempts to answer the questions: Is economic growth in Korea pro-poor? And if so, what is its degree? How does Korea compare with Thailand in terms of its degree of pro-poorness? The chapter also develops a regression model that can be used to forecast the incidence of poverty on the basis of information on growth rate per capita GDP and unemployment rate.
