[The Public = Daniel Park] 2020 and 2021 are the years of experiencing a new daily life worldwide due to COVID-19. Due to social distancing, gatherings between people have decreased, and non-face-to-face activities such as distance learning have become commonplace.
How people's quality of life is changing due to these changes can be confirmed with the National Statistical Office's 'National Quality of Life Indicator System'. The overall society has been depressed due to COVID-19, but people's satisfaction has not decreased significantly. Satisfaction with life, living environment, jobs, income, and consumption all improved compared to the previous year, and institutional trust, a sense of belonging to the local community, civic consciousness, and corruption perception index were also found to have improved.
However, indicators related to external activities such as participation rate in social groups, expenditure on cultural leisure, number of travel days per person, number of visits to culture arts and sports, participation rate in volunteer activities, satisfaction with leisure life, obesity rate, etc. The increment is also larger. In addition, as quarantine guidelines for the prevention of COVID-19 made it inevitable to cut off from the outside world, it was found that interpersonal trust and social isolation deteriorated.
The ratio of improvement indicators is relatively high in the areas of environment and education, health, employment/wage, and subjective well-being. In particular, in the case of the environment area, all statistics for 2020 are shown except for the supply rate of water supply in rural areas, and all five indicators showing satisfaction by sector have improved in 2020, and due to COVID-19, the number of vehicles has decreased and the operation rate of business sites has decreased. As it decreased, the fine dust concentration also appeared to have improved.
In the health field, all indicators except for the healthy lifespan are statistics for 2020, showing that all indicators have improved except for the obesity rate. On the other hand, the areas with a relatively low ratio of improvement indicators compared to other areas are leisure and safety, family/community, and citizen participation.
In particular, among the six indices in the leisure area, all five indices excluding leisure time were found to have deteriorated compared to the previous year. It can be said that the area most affected by COVID-19 is related to leisure. Safety, civic participation, and family/community sectors also showed a relatively high percentage of deterioration indicators, with more than 40% of indicators worsening compared to the previous year.
In particular, the proportion of the elderly living alone has been steadily rising since 2000, and the degree of social isolation has been showing a downward trend since 2013.
The health field includes all 7 indicators, the health life span is a 5-year cycle, and the three indicators (stress perception rate, subjective health status, and physical activity rate) are data on a 2-year cycle. As a result of trend analysis, life expectancy, healthy lifespan, obesity rate, and physical activity rate indicators have all been continuously increasing since 2000, and these trends are statistically significant throughout the analysis period. The suicide rate has been on a downward trend since 2011, but has recently risen again.
The employment/wage field consists of six indicators, and five indicators except for job satisfaction are indexes that are calculated annually, and the data preparation period is relatively long compared to other fields.
In the long-term trend analysis of the employment rate, the average monthly wage, the ratio of low-wage workers, and the working hours, the changes in indicators were found to be statistically significant. The employment rate did not show a significant increase and showed a partial decline
Meanwhile, according to the 'Quality of Life 2020' announced by the National Statistical Office last year, positive emotions decreased and negative emotions increased among the subjective satisfaction with the quality of life felt by Koreans, and life satisfaction was 5.9 points, ranking lower among OECD countries.
Although we are living in the economically most prosperous era in history, subjectively, the satisfaction felt by the Korean people does not seem to have reached this level.
The Public / Daniel Park webmaster@thepublic.kr
더퍼블릭 / Daniel Park webmaster@thepublic.kr