Health capacity to work at older ages in south korea: Implications for the public pension

To inform policymakers designing social policy, we assess health capacity to work for the older men in South Korea. Following Milligan and Wise (2015), we use cohort mortality information as a proxy for overall health status and quantify the additional employment capacity of the current older men in reference to those at the same level of mortality a generation ago. Although the employment rate of the older men remained high for the last thirty years in South Korea, we still find substantial additional employment capacity among the older men (those aged 55 or more in 2016), which is comparable in size to those found in other advanced countries, indicating that improvement in older men’s mortality was considerable for the last thirty years in South Korea. This finding suggests that labor supply (dis)incentives of the older men embedded in social insurance system need to be thoroughly reexamined lest they should inhibit the labor supply of older workers.