Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, one of the world’s largest retirement funds, is about to increase its unusually small staff as the assets it oversees balloon.
GPIF, which managed ¥260 trillion ($1.8 trillion) in assets at the end of June, only has 187 employees, versus 676 at Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, which oversaw the equivalent of $1.92 trillion at the end of 2024. Similarly, large retirement funds in Canada and California manage less than a third of what GPIF does, but each has more than 2,000 people on payroll.
GPIF’s small staff size stems from its early days after its founding in 2006, when the organization outsourced most of its investments and put a majority of its funds in domestic bonds. Reflecting a global shift by pension plans toward riskier investments to bolster returns, Tokyo-based GPIF now earmarks about half of its funds to Japanese and foreign shares, and it also puts money in alternative assets such as private equity.
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