Public Pension and Insurance: Public Pension System scheduled as an Insurance

All the social insurance systems in Japan have faced number of difficulties in recent years mainly because, on the one hand both aging and number of children declining had accelerated and on the other hand Japan experienced stagnated economy after 1990. Among them the public pension system experienced the worst because a variety of problems such as incompleteness or losses of pension-subscriber records, lowering of reference salaries in the pension for the hired, usurpation of pension premiums had reported via mass-communications and the pension system decreased its reliability. This paper reexamines the problems concerning the public pension by considering what the pension system as an insurance sheds light to those problems. Though it is true that the pension is called often gpension insuranceh, its understanding as an insurance is very rare both in its design or construction and in its management in reality, and such an examination as above contributes the purpose. The paper examines first the working and features of the pension as an insurance. They are then utiilized to reconsider the problems concerning the pension system as above and examine what are the solutions to those problems and what is the good form of the pension system.