The employment rate of North Korean defectors in South Korea reached a new high of 60.5 percent earlier this year, a report showed Wednesday, in a sign of improving living conditions for those who fled from the North.

The April figure — which serves as annual statistics for North Korean defectors — marked a 1.3 percentage point increase from the same period of last year and the highest rate since 2011, when the Korea Hana Foundation, affiliated with the unification ministry in charge of inter-Korean affairs, began compiling relevant data.

The figure mostly hovered below the 60 percent mark before peaking at 60.4 percent in 2018. In 2011, the employment rate came to 49.7 percent.

Other figures also indicated an overall improvement in economic circumstances of North Korean defectors.

This Dec. 1, 2023, file photo shows people attending a job fair organized by the unification ministry for North Korean defectors at COEX in southern Seoul.

Their jobless rate fell 1.6 percentage points on-year to a record low of 4.5 percent in April while the monthly average wage rose 73,000 won (US$56.3) to 2.46 million won in the same month, according to the report.

The report was based on a survey of 2,500 North Korean defectors aged 15 and older who arrived in South Korea between January 1997 and December 2022.

To put that into perspective, South Korea’s jobless rate fell 0.2 percentage point on-year to 2.8 percent in April. South Korea’s employment rate for people aged 15 and older reached 62.7 percent in April, up 0.6 percentage point from the same period of last year.

In a separate survey conducted in May and June, a record 79.3 percent of the 2,500 North Korean defectors said they were satisfied with their new lives in South Korea.

Among those who said they were happy, 41 percent attributed this to being able to live a free life, while 28.3 percent of those who were not satisfied picked being separated from their families.

The report showed that a majority of the respondents had optimistic outlooks for their lives in South Korea.

Source: Yonhap News Agency