Beijing Hosts Seminar on Supplementary Pension Insurance

����The International Seminar of Supplementary Pensions in China's Enterprises opened on October 20 in Beijing attended by more than 100 scholars, experts and government officials, mainly from China and the United States.

����Wang Jianlun, vice-minister of labor and social security, said in his opening remarks that in recent years, enterprises' supplementary pensions have been given great attention by the Chinese government, enterprises and researchers.

����"Only the establishment of a multi-tiered pension system, including supplementary pensions, can assure that reform of the basic pension system matches other aspects of the economy, supplements the basic pension, rationally shares the risks, mitigates the increasingly acute contradictions between supply and demand of retirement benefits, and protects and improves the basic living standard of retired workers," she said.

����China began to sponsor supplementary pension plans in the late 1980's. However, according to Wang, it is still in a start-up phase in China.

����By 1998, she said, the number of workers participating in supplementary pension plans was less than five percent, while in countries with a fully developed supplementary pension plan system, this figure can reach 50 percent or even 75 percent.

����"The Chinese government is now taking measures to adjust and standardize the supplementary pension system as well as to improve related policies in order to promote the healthy development of supplementary pension plan in enterprise," she said.

����Today's seminar was jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company ( MetLife) of the US.

����Founded in 1868 and headquartered in New York, MetLife is one of the world's leading providers of insurance and financial products and services to a broad spectrum of individual and group customers.