【正文】
y bee much harder to manage the social security fund’s investments.For the last 30 years, the Chinese government has gradually been restructuring its stateowned enterprise financed retirement system into a state sponsored social security system. In the early 1990’s, the administration created a new retirement program that integrated individual accounts with social pooling. Then, in 2000, the National Social Security Fund was founded soon followed by the enterprise annuity system in 2004. By 2015, China’s babyboom generation will start reaching retirement age. According to the United Nations, China is already an aging society’? The UN maintains that a society is defined as aging when adults aged 65 or older exceed 7% of the total population. China crossed that threshold sometimes between 2000 and 2005. It is estimated that by 2010, there will be 174 million adults over the age of 60 accounting for % of China’s population. Furthermore, China’s labor force, prising all able bodied men and women between the age of 15 and 65, will reach its peak in 2020 with more than 940 million people. It will then start declining and India will overtake China as the country with the largest labor force in the world. Around 2035, Chinese population will peak at billion people, and then begin to decline to be replaced by India as the world’s most populous nation. To some extent, China’s flawed social security system is racing against the country’s aging process. The number of people receiving payments under China’s social security system is now increasing annually. There are now over 200 million urban employees covered under the pension insurance and medical insurance coverage。 and the new type of rural cooperative medical insurance is now covering 86% of rural residents, it is expected to cover the remaining 14% by the end of 2008. Investment channels for the social security fund are also widening. By the end of 2007, the total revenue of both urban and rural insurance funds exceeded 1 trillion Yuan. However, since the country started promoting the reform of state owned enterprises in 1997, more than 25 million workers have been laidoff and since the old system of stateowned enterprises used to provide employees with a generous pension offer under a payasyougo system, the country now has to carry the burden of the legacy pension debts. At the same time, current employees?individual accounts have bee notional ones, creating a loss of at least 800 billion Yuan for the social security system.There are still many problems that exist in the ongoing restructuring of China’s pension system. Policy makers in Beijing haven’t even reached a consensus on the best way of managing China’s pension fund, so the fund’s operations lack independence, transparency and liability. This is perfectly exemplified by Shanghai’s social security fund scandal. The fund’s management system is still lagging behind in terms of: investment operations, assets and liability management, diversity and risk management, management of internal and external personnel. If we don’t take effective measure to cope with such challenges, the development of the pension system will bee Dai Xianglong. Dai used to be the mayor of Tianjin and Governor of the PBoC, the country’s central bank。 he took Xiang Huaicheng’s place as Chairman of the National Council for Social Security a month ago.The value of pension funds around the world has now exceeded 20 trillion dollars, accounting for 50% of the global GDP and 20% of the international capital market. The management of pension funds has made progress in: marketing operations, improving management levels and investment concepts, as well as diversifying development. The influence of pension funds on the international capital market is gradually intensifying. Dai Xianglong thin