[Contribution] Dispelling Young People’s Misunderstandings About the Depletion of the National Pension (1) (August 25, 2026)

(An official of the National Pension Service —

why!

do they keep contributing

pieces

of this type!

Is it that they write them

believing that young people will agree

with this logic!

We wonder.

As for what young people’s position

actually is,

watching the Pension Future Forum’s Yeongeumtong

Shorts should make it clear.)

The question of the National Pension’s depletion is one of the leading items over which young people feel a sense of relative deprivation in our society. It is the anxiety that they will pay contributions all their lives for the older generation, only for the fund to be depleted by the time they themselves come to receive the National Pension, so that they may not receive a pension at all.

On March 20, 2025, the government achieved a historic National Pension reform, the first in 18 years. At that time, in response to young people’s anxiety about depletion of the National Pension, a “provision guaranteeing the State’s obligation to pay” was newly established and written into statute; yet a year and a half later, young people’s distrust of the National Pension remains great.

Considering that the reason politicians boldly pushed through National Pension reform last year, at considerable political cost, was precisely to secure the National Pension — the future of the younger generation — its purpose and effect were not properly conveyed to those concerned. Politicians may well feel considerably aggrieved at a reality in which anxiety has instead grown.

Meanwhile, the government is reported to be planning to implement a “first-in-life pension contribution support program” from January next year, in order to close the pension blind spots for young people and strengthen old-age income security. Following last year’s successful pension reform, this is to be understood as a sincere effort to win young people’s hearts back to the National Pension by whatever means; as things stand, however, success looks hard to guarantee. That is because the precondition for the program’s success — dispelling young people’s distrust over depletion of the National Pension — has still not been resolved.

(abridged)

Let us begin with the question: “If the National Pension really were to be depleted, would we in fact be unable to receive a pension?” It is an extreme assumption, but a necessary one for understanding the depletion issue properly. The National Pension is one of the social security schemes operated by the State, and under no circumstances will a situation arise in which pensions cannot be paid. Even now, the Government Employees Pension and the Military Personnel Pension have long since exhausted their funds, yet pensions continue to be paid stably. The same is true abroad.

Viewed globally, the countries that accumulate a fund and pay pensions from it are in fact only a small minority. Among European countries, only Norway (which builds and manages a sovereign wealth fund from North Sea oil revenues and uses it as a source of pension payments) and the Netherlands do so; most of the rest have almost no accumulated fund at all. Countries such as Sweden and Ireland go no further than building and operating a “reserve fund” from separate resources (such as additional contributions levied on the public) in order to cope with population aging and the uncertainty and volatility of the future economy. Apart from these, the countries that build up a fund and operate a pension scheme on it amount to little more than Korea’s National Pension, Canada, Japan and the California public employees’ pension scheme in the United States.

It can be seen, then, that the logic that pensions cannot be paid once the fund disappears does not hold. Far more important than this is the question of which method keeps the public’s contribution burden from becoming excessive, and how far the pension received actually helps in old age — regardless of whether an accumulated fund exists and how large it may be.

From this point of view, countries that use an accumulated fund to pay pensions — Korea, Canada, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands and others — can be said to be superior to European and other countries that operate pension schemes without an accumulated fund, in that they pay pensions at an appropriate level while imposing a relatively lower contribution burden.

https://m.newspim.com/news/view/20260824001067