국민연금의 개인적 소득재분배 효과와 개선방안 = The Effects of Interpersonal Income Redistribution of the Social Pension Insurance in Korea and an Alternative Plan

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Since April 1, 1999 the Reformation of the Social Pension Insurance(henceforth SPI) has turned its way toward a universal insurance for the income security of the retired people. The primary purpose of SPI is to guarantee an adequate level of living standards for people after their retirement through social solidarity and to secure them from poverty. However, social policy makers understand SPI as a social security system that guarantees the needs for an existential minimum. The reason is that they have lived in the world where a man is regarded as only a social animal. They do not admit the fact that a man is also an economical animal, and they make little account of the distributive justice that is based on productivity. A social insurance determines a premium simply by the market income multiplied by a fixed ratio. In the determination, people are insured with the veil of ignorance about their social characteristics such as age, sexuality, a family relation, a physical state, an expected span of life, etc. Besides, the social solidarity for survivors pension, family aid, and division pension for the separation improves social equality. Here, we already have the effect of income redistribution at the connection of social solidarity to the principle of insurance. However, failing to reach the optimal balance between incomings and outgoings per person, SPI in Korea causes an inequality in interpersonal redistribution. That is, the fixed monthly income grade of SPI results in a negative effect to income redistribution, and it stimulates people to declare their income lower and thus to subscribe their contract with a lower standard monthly income and in a short term. Especially, the more a member of SPI who works in a private company is young, and the more his income raises, and the more his term of insurance is long, the more he loses. This is because social policy makers, forgetting the principle of the adequate balance between incomes and outgoings that is important in a social insurance, try to guarantee only an existential minimum based upon the principle of provision on the whole. But the social benefit of SPI is not a gift from the state but a right given at the cost of a premium. Consequentially, by collecting a SPI premium from the poor and the low-income brackets who are living under an existential minimum, and by paying them pensions under minimum living expenses, the state expands the low-income brackets as well as punishes an increased income of the market. If SPI plays its role as a social insurance, it should arrive at an adequate social balance between incomings and outgoings and between economic productivity and social equality, and it should establish social consensus for the income redistribution among persons, social classes and generations with regard to a social risk, a financial burden, and a pension for old age. If we leave the solution to our next generation for the reason that the problem is difficult to solve, then they will blame the burden on us and say, You leaned us only a burden. Our generation will have to say to the next generation that we have tried to our best to make SPI play its role rightly. It`s time for SPI to be reformed radically from the direction of realizing the distributive justice.