Video | How minimal social security forces elderly Koreans to work past retirement age

One of millions of elderly South Koreans pushed into working well past the official retirement age of 60, Park Jae-yeol should have retired 11 years ago. Unable to survive on stingy South Korean state pensions, the 71-year-old must keep working, delivering packages to high-rise flats.

He pushes a cartload of brown boxes into a lift at a block of flats in Seoul, his ageing eyes strained by constant squinting at tiny address labels.

“Money is the biggest reason” for continuing to work, says Park.

Social safety nets in the rapidly ageing country are weak, despite South Korea being a developed country. It’s a situation with which elderly Hongkongers will be wearily familiar. 

More than 45 per cent of elderly South Koreans live in relative poverty – defined as surviving on less than half of the median household income – by far the highest proportion in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, where the average is 12.5 per cent. (In Hong Kong, one in three elderly Hongkongers live in poverty, 436,400 of them in 2014.)

Poverty in Hong Kong hits record high, with 1 in 5 people considered poor

Park is one of millions whose efforts powered the “Miracle on the Han”, the country’s transformation from a war-ravaged ruin in the 1950s to the world’s 11th largest economy.