A political economy of pension reform in Korea.

This thesis is the first paper to take a political economy approach in exploring the fundamental factors of the 2007 Korean pension reform in a critical manner. The financial elements of the funded National Pension Scheme (NPS) inevitably created various intcrdependencies with the PAYG public pensions. As a result, the Korean pension reform process was executed in a different manner from that in Western pension welfare state-economic regimes.