Mar 11, 2009
The pace at which the Republic of Korea is become more international is quickening, according to a government report from the National Statistic Office that cites four times as many non-Koreans registered in the country than eight years ago and more than twice as many marriages involving a non-Korean compared with six years ago.
The 2008 report released in Feb. 2009, which tracks a broad range of statistics about Korean society, said that registered non-Koreans numbered 854,000, or 1.8% of the country's population compared with 210,000 in the year 2000. The population in total grew by 0.13% to 48.6 million.
Nearly all development statistics have shown improvement over the past 10 years, including life expectancy (79.6 years in 2007, 5.2% greater than in 1997), college matriculation rates (83.8% in 2007 compared with 64.1% in 1997), laborer's average monthly salaries (up 4.1% from 2007), and traffic accident deaths (half of the number of deaths in 1990).
As further indications of technical advances, the use of landline telephones decreased 4.3% since 2007, while use of mobile phones increased 4.8% to 45.6 million people, about 94% of the population. In addition the number of people in Korea using online banking services is more than 13 times what it was 10 years, currently at about 5.3 million, or 11% of the population.
For more details on the National Statistic Office's "Korean Social Statistics 2008" (in Korean), visit http://www.nso.go.kr.
Translation source: Korea Beat, at www.koreabeat.com.
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