The government has been pursuing programs to create jobs for senior citizens in order to alleviate poverty and loneliness by creating “jobs for senior citizens.’ With objectives such as adding 50 thousand jobs for senior citizens and increasing their wages, the incumbent administration has been steadily increasing the scale and budget of job creation programs for senior citizens each year. As a result, the number of jobs for seniors as of 2016 totaled 3.87 million with national earmarks of 382.4 billion won and local government earmarks of 364.9 billion. Still, an in-depth evaluation of senior citizen job programs is necessary as investment does not guarantee the desired outcome of resolving the issues regarding seniors.
To this end, this report is an evaluation of the incumbent government’s programs to determine whether they have resulted in adequate outcomes in creating senior citizen jobs, whether the jobs are allocated in a rational manner by job type and by individual local governments, whether there is any unfairness in the process of implementing the programs and whether sufficient consideration is given to low-income seniors in the participant selection process and throughout the management of the programs. Furthermore, an estimation of medium-to-long-term demand for such programs has been made, providing data for national and local government fiscal forecasts.

   As a result, while the incumbent government has been achieving its quantitative goals in an adeqaute manner, it was found that improvement was slow with regard to quantitative aspects of jobs such as frozen wages. In addition, the sector in which new jobs are made available is skewed toward the “less-work-with-less-pay” public sector rather than the “more-work-with-more-pay” private sector which seniors prefer. The allocation of a number of programs among local governments also showed a mis-match between senior demand and actual job supply. Meanwhile, the report also found some unfair practices in programs enabling retirees from high-income positions in organizations such as public institutions to maintain jobs with a high level of income in the same organization (such as the Skilled Seniors Club). Another issue found was that the selection criteria or accessibility for participants did not fully accommodate the participation of low-income senior citizens.

   Therefore, the government needs to review measures to gradually increase wages to prevent an excessive escalation of fiscal burdens on national and local governments. In addition, it is necessary to actively respond to the seniors’ demands by increasing flexibility in the management of job-creation programs in the private sector and improving the program allocation method for local governments which has been managed based on the number of programs available vis-a-vis the number requested by each local government in the previous year. A review of the policy priority and need for support of programs such as the Skilled Seniors Club is also deemed necessary. Furthermore, in order to ensure participation by low-income seniors, there is a need to reform the selection criteria for private sector senior jobs while diversifying the type of jobs offered and boosting promotion efforts so that the accessibility gap for senior jobs may be reduced.