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| Lead economist Philip O'Keefe for the World Bank's social protection and labor global practice, left, and World Bank chief economist Sudhir Shetty for the East Asia Pacific region, pose for a photo after an interview with The Korea Times at Plaza Hotel in Seoul last month. / Korea Times photo by Kim Jae-won |
By Kim Jae-won
A World Bank (WB) economist said that Korea needs to adopt an innovative way to credit voluntary work called "time banks" to boost the number of volunteers here helping senior citizens deal with their poverty and loneliness.
Philip O'Keefe, a lead economist in the social protection labor global practice at the WB, said an inter-generational cooperation system would be effective in Korea, which has one of the worst poverty and suicide rates for senior citizens among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members.
"When you are a younger-old person, you give your time to look after an older person. Essentially, you get credit for the number of hours you spend volunteering. When you become an older person, you get the same number of hours that you put in when you were a younger-old person," said O'Keefe in a recent interview with The Korea Times in a Seoul hotel.
He visited Korea as part of his Asian trip to introduce the bank's report titled "Live Long and Prosper: Aging in East Asia and the Pacific Region."
O'Keefe works in East Asia and the Pacific region primarily. Previously, he was the lead human development economist for the region.
Prior to joining the bank in 1993, he was a lecturer at the University of Warwick in the U.K. He holds degrees from the University of Sydney, the London School of Economics and Political Science and Oxford University.
The Australian scholar said some countries such as China and Britain are benefiting from the system, creating an innovative way to solve problems from their aging societies.
The economist pointed out that Korea is ringing the alarm bells in poverty and suicide from older people. According to the OECD, 49 percent of Korean senior citizens suffered from poverty in 2014, more than three times the average of the organization which stood at 13 percent.
The nation's suicide rate among older people is an even more critical situation. According to a 2014 report from the World Health Organization, 116.2 people per every 100,000 senior citizens age 70 or older kill themselves, far higher than other countries which posted between 5.8 and 42.3.
O'Keefe said that Korea needs to set up more aggressive pension policies to prepare for an aging society as the country is entering a time in which people age 65 and older represent more than 14 percent of the whole population. He said that the current level of 9 percent of contributions for the state pension was pretty low, compared to other advanced countries.
"The wider group of East Asian and Pacific countries with mature but low-coverage mandated contributory systems should also consider shifting the balance of their pension system financing toward general revenue-financed redistribution and modest benefit levels, but in ways that do not compromise incentives to participate in the contributory scheme," according to the WB report.
Sudhir Shetty, chief economist for the East Asia and Pacific region at the bank, said that Asia's fourth-largest economy should draw more females into the workplace by providing more effective childcare systems. He praised Korea's well-educated female workforce and forecast that they will contribute to the nation's economy by becoming innovators.
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