Pension crisis looms as managers raid funds to pay shortfall

2005年11月25日
China's pension fund is "under tremendous pressure", according to Xiang Huaicheng, chairman of the National Council for Social Security Fund.

Pension funds have been under pressure since 1997, when the Chinese government implemented a policy of combining mutual assistance programs with personal pension accounts.

The lack of cash in the pension fund is due largely to the fact that workers in state-owned enterprises never had to make any contributions to the pension fund before the government set up the combined pension insurance system.

But since 1997, in order to ensure that retired workers receive an adequate pension that is paid on time, the officials managing the pension funds have had no other choice but to use the money in employees' personal accounts to cover the pension payments. As a result, the shortfall in the empty accounts has snowballed to 740 billion yuan and is rising every year.

By 2004, more than 160 million people in China had participated in the pension scheme. However, this accounts for only 30 percent of the total urban population and covers only around 15 percent of the total labour force. Since 2001, the number of workers in state-owned enterprises and collectively-owned enterprises in cities and towns who are covered by pension funds has grown each year by an average of 4.04 percent, while the number of retired workers has increased by an average of 6.64 percent. The difference in the two figures means that the number of people paying pension premiums is lagging increasingly far behind the number of people who receive pension payments.

Source: China Securities Journal (14 November 2005)

Reference: China's Labour System

25 November 2005
返回页首

本网站使用cookie来收集有关您计算机的信息。

请参阅中国劳工通讯的「隐私政策」以准确了解我们向网站用户及电子报订阅者收集何种信息, 我们如何使用这些信息,以及如果您对此有任何疑虑,如何联系我们。