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Issues of the German Social Insurance Reform Proposals and Their Implications

Kyu Sung Hwang 1

1한신대학교 한신학술원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to reveal the background and issues of the current reform proposals for social insurance in Germany and to draw their implications for Korea. The essence of the German social insurance crisis is that of normality of industrial society on which it has been based, revealing itself by the dual crisis of finance and dualization. Reform proposals are regarded as diverse responses to the crisis of the normality within individual social insurance schemes. They are searching for transforming health insurance into citizen’s insurance, pension insurance into various alternatives including all worker’s insurance and citizen’s pension, unemployment insurance into employment insurance. One of the commonalities of the them is that they attempt to reconstruct the old normality. However, due to the economic recovery, the historical experiences of improving social insurance, and high satisfaction, they are expected to struggle with the gradual improvements rather than radical shift from their tradition. In Korea, where the maturity of social insurance is low, it is necessary to mark the crisis faced by German social insurance as a teacher. We need to go back to the fundamental spirit of social policy and redraw the blue prints of social policy by opening minds to plentiful alternatives in the eyes of normality reconstruction.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.