A Study of Public and Private Pension Insurance of the Self-employed in South Korea

Abstract

This study examined the determinants of the pension plans for Korean self-employed persons’ pension insurance from the multi-pillar perspective. With the second wave of Korea Welfare Panel Study dataset in 2007, logistic regression and multinomial analysis were used to analyze the causal relations between the socio-economic characteristics of the self-employed and public and private pension insurance. The main findings can be summarized as follows. More than half of the self-employed were not covered by public pension not only because of financial strain but also as a result of intentional evasion. The self-employed covered by multi-pillar system (public and private pensions) had high probability of being younger with higher income working in the manufacturing, food, wholesale or retail sectors. The results also suggest that age and income are the significant factors affecting the probability of a self-employed individual’s participation in pension plans.