Some 3,000 people started their own business per day in 2014, but two-thirds of them had closed down a year later, statistics from the National Tax Service showed Monday.
Based on the number of new businesses who filed value-added taxes for the first time in 2015, close to 1.07 million people became self-employed on a daily average in 2014. But by the following year, 739,000 people had closed down their shops, an average of 2,000 per day, the tally showed.
The kinds of new businesses were heavily concentrated in services, real estate and rentals, retail and restaurants, which accounted for 73.5 percent of the total. Service businesses counted for the most at 19.6 percent, ranging from dry cleaners and beauty salons to travel agencies and education institutions. Next were leasing business, including office space, land and rentals, such as water purifiers, which accounted for 19.2 percent. Retail businesses (17.6 percent) and restaurants (17.1 percent) followed next.
Business closures were most rampant for restaurants (20.6 percent), followed by retail businesses (19.9 percent) and services (19.7 percent). Real estate leases and rentals came next at 12.3 percent.
"The number of self-employed can increase when people are forced to start their own business from a lack of jobs as the economy stalls," Seong Jae-min, head of the center for labor trends analysis at the Korea Labor Institute, said in his recent report.
"Under such circumstances, the increase in the number of self-employed can become the cause for the increase in household debts and in the deteriorating quality of jobs." (Yonhap)
