The government vowed to offer new life opportunities to the baby boomer generation and encourage their participation in society by legislating measures aimed at supporting them in old age.

Officials from nine ministries, including the Welfare Ministry and Labor Ministry, came up with 35 measures to help baby boomers stand on their own feet in their latter years, during a meeting on emergency economic measures hosted by President Lee Myung-bak on Thursday.

The term refers to about 7.14 million citizens, 14.4 percent of South Korea’s population, who were born between 1955 and 1963. About 74.6 percent of them graduated high school and 75 percent are currently employed.

About 530,000 of them will retire by 2015 and over 980,000 between 2016 and 2020, according to the Korea Development Institute. Welfare Ministry research last year showed that 53.7 percent of baby boomers think they are not ready for retirement, while 44.1 percent said they are quite ready and only 2.2 percent said they were “ready enough.”

The Welfare Ministry pledged to enact a law on support for old age and provide support for customized retirement planning services. It will also set up a center offering overall information on policies and statistics about baby boomers and is considering reorganizing the medical check-up system.

The Labor Ministry announced plans to later introduce a system through which workers can request working-hour reductions in order to work longer and prepare for the second phase of their lives. The government will offer support to employers who hire the young, the disabled or other long-term job seekers to fill the lost working hours.

It will also obligate large conglomerates to support career changes of baby boomers forced to retire because of their age. It will also encourage public organizations to lead the abolishment of the working age limit, or to raise the limit.

Taking into account that baby boomers show a high tendency to fail when starting a new business after retiring, the Small and Medium Business Administration plans to help post-retired entrepreneurs by supporting development and marketing costs when they turn innovative ideas into business; running schools for small enterprises; and offering a total of 50 billion won to baby boomers seeking to start new a business, through Industrial Bank of Korea.

The government will establish details of the plans by the end of the year.

By Park Min-young  (claire@heraldcorp.com)