I REFER to Wednesday's report, 'Ranking of CPF flawed: Expert'.

I agree with the observations made by National University of Singapore's Associate Professor Chia Ngee Choon, that the Central Provident Fund (CPF) received a relatively poor score in the Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index because the measuring criteria did not take into account its unique features - that is, CPF can be used for housing and medical needs. Nevertheless, there are valuable takeaways from the report findings, particularly the low score on net replacement rate.

While CPF aims to meet retirement, housing and medical needs, we need to recognise that most of the remaining pension systems in the survey focus solely on providing retirement income. For medical needs, most of these countries have some form of health-care system which need not be funded from people's retirement incomes. Similarly, housing would have been paid for without using retirement savings.

While it is true that CPF has various housing schemes to help members improve their retirement incomes, we need to recognise that the retirees in other pension systems need not juggle such competing priorities in their retirement days.

On the other hand, there are clearly many shortfalls in the other countries' pension and health-care systems and I am not prepared to concede that CPF is inferior to these systems.

However, we should accept the score on adequacy sub-index and let the score be the catalyst to thinking about how we could help people to be more prepared about retirement. The last thing we should do is turn this into a score improvement exercise by imposing changes to the evaluation criteria.

Kwong Hui Hen

This article was first published in The Straits Times.