공적연금제도의 문제점과 개선방향

Direction of Public Pension Reform

The public pension scheme in Korea has grown into an important old age security with the rapid extension of its coverage in recent years. However, public pension schemes are suffering from the serious problems of financial instability arising from the structural imbalance between contribution and pension benefit. The reform of public pensions is essential for a sound and sustained growth in the midst of rapidly changing social environments. This article shows that reforming the public pension system based on “low contribution, high pension” characteristic is an extremely difficult proposition in a democratic society in which majority voting prevails. That is, once a pension increase is carried out, it is very difficult to reduce pension benefits or to increase contributions due to political and other considerations by citing some theoretical and empirical evidences. The article suggests that the notional defined contribution scheme would be a useful reform strategy in transforming the current unfunded scheme (civil service pension, private school teachers’ pension scheme) to a “fair contribution, fair pension” scheme. In many countries where public pension schemes are being operated as a defined benefit scheme like in Korea, certain pension benefits are guaranteed regardless of contributions and yields from investment of fund reserves. Under the notional defined contribution scheme, each participant is allotted with a notional account to which contribution as well as adjustment arising from real wage increase will be recorded. Since there is no account value except for the record, it is called notional account. Under the notional defined contribution scheme, the pension benefit calculation is not only based on the amount of contributions but also takes into accounts of the life expectancy at the time of retirement. In addition to that, the notional defined contribution scheme can prevent excessive pension benefits and the fruits of GDP growth can be fairly shared by all generation, by linking pension benefit with GDP growth rate.