Eighty-year-old Chinese farmer Guo Shuhe receives a state pension equivalent to just $9 a month, not enough to buy a month worth of groceries, but enough it seems, to risk punching a gaping hole in government finances.
Guo, whose palms are thick and rough from a life spent hoeing fields in southwest China, is one of over 150 million people covered by a rapidly expanding rural retirement scheme which is accelerating the nation's slide into a pension crisis.
"Fifty-five yuan a month is little, but it's better than nothing," said Guo, rubbing his head with his hands at his home in Ledu County, a village 3,000 meters above sea level in China's mountainous Qinghai province, bordering Tibet.
Guo, though, is fortunate because he also has the financial support of six children. But for younger and future generations of retirees, China's traditional family safety net is disappearing, replaced by state-backed pension schemes tailored for a graying society.
Policy makers and economists have long been worried about the financial burden of China's expanding patchwork of pension schemes, but those concerns have recently escalated as its rural pension scheme took off in the past three years.
The funding shortage is daunting: economists say it could blow out to a whopping $10.8 trillion in the next 20 years from $2.6 trillion in 2010, towering over China's $3 trillion onshore savings, the biggest hoard of domestic savings in the world.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/30/us-china-pensions-idUSBRE88T0JP20120930
No comments:
Post a Comment