Owners aged 60 and over account for more than all of Korea's net growth in business operators

Population ageing explains only part of it. Business owners get older along with everyone else, but owners aged 60 or older grew 5.3% while the 60-plus population grew 3.3% ^[2][9], a gap of 2 percentage points ^[19]. Korea's population in its 30s grew 0.8% over the same year, yet owners in their 30s slipped 0.1% ^[10][6]. Most of the excess is above 70. That bracket supplied about 60% of the increase in older owners ^[16].

Take the older owners out of the total and everyone else shrank by 50,844 (a net 133,382 added overall, less 184,226 aged 60 or older) ^[14]. That is about 0.7% of the roughly 6.82 million owners under 60 ^[15]. Restaurants show the same subtraction against a falling total: owners under 60 in the industry fell by 22,621 in a year ^[17].

That leaves two explanations, and both can be true at once. The JoongAng Daily, which reported the tax figures, names two causes. One is pensions too small to live on, which keep older Koreans working. The other is weak domestic demand and worse conditions for the self-employed, which it says have left younger people with less reason to start businesses ^[21].

The income figures back the first explanation. The livelihood-driven retirees in the Bank of Korea's study drew an average pension of 790,000 won a month and worked 46 hours a week ^[12]. That pension comes to 9.48 million won a year ^[18]. Some 35% of newly self-employed people in their 60s cleared less than 10 million won in annual operating profit ^[13]. A retiree on that pension whose shop sits in that bracket makes from the shop, at most, about 1.05 times the pension ^[20].

In our view the owner base is ageing mainly because people past 60 need the money. Younger founders are thinning out at the same time, for the demand reasons the JoongAng Daily gives. The counter-thesis is that much of the 70-plus gain comes from long-standing owners who simply have not closed. If that holds, the restaurant numbers describe owners leaving later and a real shortage of successors. The published figures are a count of owners at the end of August, and they do not separate new entrants from incumbents ^[1].