Welcoming Accurate Reporting on National Pension Statistics!

The media are at last citing accurate statistics on the National Pension.

Reports are now revealing that 87% of National Pension beneficiaries aged 80 and above are recipients of the special old-age pension.

Special old-age pension recipients refers to the cohort for whom a special provision was applied allowing receipt of pension benefits after only five years of contributions to the National Pension.

It is entirely natural that pension benefit amounts should be low when contributions were made for only five years.

The Pension Future Forum has consistently emphasized this problem of the "fallacy of averages."

Although this recognition has come belatedly, the Forum welcomes the fact that the media are now reporting accurately on the realities of National Pension benefit amounts.

The reason National Pension benefit amounts in Korea are low is not that the income replacement rate is too low.

It is simply a problem arising from the fact that the average contribution period for the National Pension is excessively short compared with those of major advanced economies.

Already, the average contribution period for the National Pension across the majority of OECD member countries stands at around 35 years, with countries such as Germany exceeding 40 years, and yet

the public has been gaslighted by projections applying an assumption that the average National Pension contribution period will remain at 26 to 27 years even 50 or 70 years into the future—and by the argument derived from such projections that, because pension amounts are low, the income replacement rate must be raised further.

Had the labor market reforms long recommended by the OECD Secretariat been properly implemented,

Korea too could have dramatically extended the average National Pension contribution period and resolved much of the retirement income gap problem.

Having fiercely opposed genuine labor market reform while claiming that low National Pension benefit amounts were the result of an insufficient income replacement rate, the specific groups in Korea that pushed through

the regressive pension bill of March 20, 2025, which provoked the anger of the younger generation, will be judged accurately by history.

(A summary of key points from the relevant news article will be posted in the Resources category.) https://n.news.naver.com/article/421/0008779638?sid=101