ABSTRACT
The Korean Civil Service Pension (CSP), implemented in 1960, is a pension scheme for government employees and is also Korea’s first occupational pension. The military personnel who were initially included in the pension plan were excluded from it in 1963, when a separate scheme, with similar benefits, was created for these state employees. The CSP is managed differently from the National Pension Scheme (NPS), which was introduced in 1988 as a pension for private sector workers (see Chapter 5). About half of OECD countries have – like Korea – a separate pension scheme for their civil service (Palacios & Whitehouse 2006, Whitehouse 2007). However in most of these nations, the pension benefit gap between the civil service scheme and the national scheme is not so large. In contrast, the benefits and eligibility requirements of the CSP are superior to that of Korea’s national pension and resemble the situation in France and Germany, where state workers have more generous income security arrangements.
