National pension fund reforms should include changes to management to boost returns, a teachers’ union official said yesterday.
“We hope the government will acknowledge that, because legal restrictions have kept national pension funds from performing better, fund management should be reformed simultaneously with any changes to pensions,” National Federation of Teachers’ Unions president Chang Hsu-cheng (張旭政) said, adding that the Public Service Pension Fund increased by an average annual rate of 2.76 percent over the past 20 years, well below what he said was the average of 4 to 6 percent for similar funds in other nations.
National pension funds are facing the risk of going bankrupt within 20 years, with discussions on reform ongoing at a national pension reform committee, which was formed by the Presidential Office.
Chang said that while there is no evidence that pension funds had been used to make politically motivated investments, regulations guaranteeing a minimum return on funds create perverse incentives that discourage fund managers from dropping poor-performing stocks.
“While the minimum return guarantee might seem to be only a basic requirement, in practice, as fund managers are public servants subject to Executive Yuan restrictions, the guarantee ultimately serves to bind them, keeping them from cutting losses,” he said.
“If return on investment falls below the Bank of Taiwan’s official savings deposit rate, the government is obliged to make up the difference, but this is only calculated after investments are sold,” he said. “The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics often requires a fund’s managing committee not to sell falling stocks to avoid having to pay into the fund, but that keeps the fund from cutting its losses.”
Chang called for reforms to allow a portion of profits from the years when the funds outperform their target growth rates to be returned to the national treasury, along with regulatory changes to allow finance professionals to be hired to manage the funds, while paying them bonuses based on performance.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching