KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study is to find implications of Swedish 1998 pension reform for Korean pension reform. In the Korean pension reform debate, people who emphasize strengthening social security conflicts with people who prioritize and fiscal stability. Recent Korean pension reform debates show key points of case study. Swedish pension reform experiences are analyzed around Korean pension reform debate issues. As Swedish reform is the case of pioneering example of respond to ageing by introducing NDC and automatic balance mechanism, transition of basic pension to guarantee pension, the contention and effects of Swedish pension reform need to be analyzed. The implications are as follows. First, to respond to decline and instability of pension benefit brought by the introduction of NDC, the reform required several prerequisites like minimum guarantee level increase. The reform included complementary measures to reduce the risk of poverty among the elderly. However, even after the reform, additional measures were needed, such as introducing new Income Pension Supplement. Second, Swedish reform case shows as the instability caused by the application of the automatic balancing mechanism was unacceptable for pensioners, so state general budget’s supplemental role can be added to alleviate the instability. Third, transition of basic pension to guarantee pension and a sufficient level of minimum guarantee needs adequacy and comprehensiveness of earning related pension. Fourth, in order to achieve pension reform by alleviating the burden of insurance premium increases and providing sufficient minimum guarantee, it is inevitable to expand governmental budget support to public pension scheme including earning-related pension in aged society.

This paper purports to explore whether civic governance in Sweden is sustainable under strong multiculturalism. The paper explains the role of civic associations in building and maintaining community facilities as if they were public agencies. The development of civic society is attributed to the value of autonomy and political/social institutions that promote civic participation. The article examines the official societal programs and voluntary community activities as citizenship courses in multicultural public housing areas. Autonomy values, consisting of self-management, self-responsibility, or active participation, can be inferred from crime rates, educational attainment, and employment situations. There are large gaps between native speakers and immigrants in each of these areas. This suggests that African and Middle Eastern Muslim newcomers may be less familiar with autonomy. It also suggests the difficulty of social integrity in a complicated multicultural world. The formal citizenship programs, as well as the day-to-day community activities for immigrants, will not work very well in an increasingly multicultural society. The recent hardline approach to immigration and integration policies will produce tangible short-term results in language acquisition and employment. However, these outcomes may not directly lead to an autonomous civic governance in the future.

This study analyzes the university system and higher education policy in Finland, a country that emerged as a leading innovator through the 20th Century as a member of the Nordic countries by creating a virtuous cycle of democracy, welfare state, and education and social policy. In particular, the paper examines how the Finnish university system was decentralized and expanded in the post-war development of democracy and the welfare state in Finland through the linkage of regional development policies and social democratic ideal of equal education; how universities of applied sciences were created and institutionalized in the context of the economic crisis of the early 1990s and the establishment of a national innovation system; and how the 2010 Universities Act reform was implemented under the hegemony of neoliberal ideology such as academic capitalism and national competitiveness discourses. It provides an systemic examination of how different social and functional pressures play out in the process of university system changes and higher education policy development, how different political actors such as the Ministry of Education, parliamentary party groups, and representative organizations of universities and labor markets competed and interacted, and how ideologies and policy ideas such as local democracy, universalist concept of equal education, and neoliberal market-oriented discourses of educational reforms have made influences in the process.