The Korea Local Administration Review

As the prolonged COVID19 pandemic causes a economic crisis nationwide, more people are now exposed to the risk of suffering stress and depression. Especially when the economic situation worsens and income inequality rises, those who feel relatively deprived regardless of their absolute material standing are more likely to suffer from depression because they feel like a failure. In this sense, this study is to examine whether rapidly deteriorating income inequality could be attributed to the rise in depression among adults. For this purpose, a multi-level analysis is conducted. This study uses seven individual-level variables such as age, family disposable income, sex, marital status, educational level, satisfaction with a social network, and severity of chronical diseases and one regional-level variable, Gini coefficient, all drawn from 4 waves (10~13) of the Korea Welfare panel Study. The result shows that there is a difference in the level of depression among adults depending on the severity of regional income inequality. And all the individual-level variables, which the previous studies consider statistically significant, are strongly correlated with depression of adult Koreans. Based on the results, the study comes up with some ideas to alleviate the regional difference of income inequality.