• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.75-110
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• 2003

It is urgent to systematically understand vocational training and qualification systems in advanced nations in order to evaluate and reform the Korean counterparts. In the British case, the system has been transformed from the market-led one to the state-led one while the German system is still classified as a corporatistic one. This structural difference is crucial to understand their performances and the German one won a relatively more positive evaluation in its performance. However, the structure and function of the German system has lately revealed numerous limitations in face of the political unification and long duration of economic recessions. This study shows that those differences in structural and functional features and recent developments of the systems in two nations are closely associated with their differences in educational philosophies and occupational cultures, roles of the state and employers, and operation mechanisms of training courses and vocational qualifications systems. Understanding those national differences raises a fundamental question on the hasty prescription of some domestic studies that a few policies in the foreign systems must be implanted to reform the Korean counterpart without understanding the fundamental difference between the domestic and those foreign systems.

• 한국사회정책
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.1-24
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• 2016

This paper examines whether the pension systems of the western countries which was traditionally classified into the Beveridgean and Bismarckian pension regime will converge after recent pension reforms in the financial sustainability and adequacy perspective by comparing between UK, Germany and Sweden. As a result of pension reforms for the last 20 years, the gap between the Beveridgean and Bismarckian pension regime will be likely to decrease and, in particular, the tendency to convergency in adequacy is found. Even though it is not jumped to a conclusion that public pension expenditure between the three countries is likely to converge, the tendency to convergency in financial sustainability is also found if the difference of demographic aging between countries is considered. The paper suggests that it is necessary to make agreement between the range of pension expenditure and replacement ratio that western countries suggest in pension debate in Korea, instead of hitherto useless controversy between financial sustainability and adequacy.