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This paper presents the architecture of the Swedish pension system, the philosophy behind it and illustrates how it works in practice. At the foundation of the Swedish pensions landscape is the public pension commitment. It is based on the philosophy that all countries must begin with: The commitment to provide a sufficient minimum standard of living in old age for all. This is the role of the necessary pillar zero. Pillars one and two consist of mandatory universal public nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) and a financial defined contribution (FDC) schemes. These cover the earnings of all employees and self-employed – up to a ceiling. In principle, the technical construction of the NDC and the guarantee benefits – explained in greater detail in the paper – can be viewed together as a package that fulfills the guaranteed minimum standard of living in old age, while making full use of the DC accounts to provide an incentive for individuals to contribute to their own retirement income.
自芬兰于2017年开启全民基本收入(UBI)实验,首次在国家层面将其由理念转化为政策以来,吸引了全球广泛关注。本文基于近年来该领域的研究进展,综述适用于UBI经济分析的一般性框架,并从主流经济理论的公平、效率与财政约束维度,来评述全球范围内的UBI实验及其经济效果,总结相关经验教训,进而讨论中国实施不同形式UBI实验的可行性。本文认为,局部UBI实验与我国现行低保政策基本相同,不充分UBI实验缺乏对低收入群体的保障能力,经典UBI实验则面临很大的财政压力,而以税收为其筹资则会进一步造成激励扭曲和效率损失。尽管如此,考虑到UBI理念在社会公平上的重大含义,寻求经济上有效率且可持续的实施方案就尤为重要,虽然我国短期内实施经典UBI方案的可行性有限,但长期内仍然值得社会各界的不断探索。
This paper offers a new prospect on assessing government cash transfers using a social welfare function framework. It demonstrates how one can use social welfare functions to measures the program efficiency without specifying a poverty line and poverty measures. The paper introduces three alternative principles of targeting, which provides a basis for measuring the program efficiency. By applying the methodology developed in this paper, we compare the targeting efficiencies of 44 countries at different stages of economic development and show that governmental transfers can play a critical role in explaining the Kuznets curve.
Effective targeting is crucial for the success of any social programme. Different evaluation methods may yield different results for any given social programme. This paper evaluates the minimum living standard guarantee programme (Dibao) in rural China using several methods, such as the income approach, the multi-dimensional poverty approach, and a proxy means test approach, and finds the targeting accuracy increases the more comprehensive the evaluation method. As the Dibao fund allocation is largely decided in the villagers’ meeting democratically with a holistic view, it may appear to suffer from a low level of targeting accuracy when simply using an income approach, but may in fact more accurate in alleviating real poverty. This paper argues that a democratically allocate social assistance fund may be a better way in combating real poverty in many developing countries, as it requires less administrative capacity and overcomes the difficulties of identifying the poor.
This documentation introduced the idea to create the weights for CHIP2007 and 2013. The original information and final weight values are also reported.
This paper studies the welfare implications of inequality among social groups by linking relative deprivation with theory of relative utility. It applies a methodology that identifies social groups that suffer greater deprivation relative to the average for the whole society, as a result of the rising inequality in China. Using five waves of the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIPs) from 1988 to 2013, it provides the dynamic evolution of deprivation suffered by different social groups such as rural residents, the elderly, the low educated group, and those live in the Western inland. Our findings provide evidence of the success of urbanization, development of Western areas and education expansion in reducing inequality and deprivation in China.
Using the conventional concept of implicit tax, we investigate pension incentives to retire for private sector employees in China. The social security pension consists of pay-as-you-go defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) systems. Based on Chinese official parameters and the revised OECD models, our studies conclude that the DB system discourages people from working more, but the DC system offers considerably greater incentives at the expense of financial sustainability. If the annuity factors in the DC scheme were linked to the probability of retirees’ mortality, then both constant incentives to work longer and financial sustainability could be achieved.
Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project surveys for 1988, 1995, 2002 and 2013, we investigate the role of public pensions in income inequality among households with elderly members across two decades of pension policy reforms. We examine the distribution and role of public pensions at a national level. We analyse the evolution of the contribution of public pensions to national income inequality across a much more extended time period than earlier studies, which have generally focused on regional changes over short periods. Our findings suggest that public pensions have become the most important source of income for households with elderly members on average in China, but the distribution of pension income is highly unequal, with a Gini coefficient of 0.74 in 2013. Public pension income has been the largest source of income inequality for elderly households since 2002 and contributed to more than half of total income inequality in the most recent year of the survey. This finding is robust against variations in the income inequality measures used. Additionally, our analysis suggests unequal distribution of pension benefits is the primary driver of pensioners’ income inequality. Among several hypothetical policy changes, ensuring a minimum pension benefit for all existing pensioners seems to be the most fiscally effective option in reducing income inequality, with a 0.8% reduction in the Gini coefficient for a 1% increase in public pension expenditure.
The relevance of tax progressivity measures to policy-making depends on whether they help assess the social welfare implications of taxation. This paper proposes a social welfare function framework to derive measures of tax progressivity and explore their normative properties. Using the social welfare framework, we derive the Kakwani index from Sen’s social welfare function as well as a new class of progressivity measures that incorporate a distribution judgment parameter capturing inequality aversion. The paper also draws social welfare implications of Suits' measure of tax progressivity. In addition, the paper proposes a new measure of tax progressivity derived from Bonferroni social welfare function. We apply the methodology developed in the paper to the Australian data on individual taxes for the 2014–2015 financial year.
The high economic growth and increasing inequality have been the two main features of the Chines economy since the end of the 1970s. The economic growth contributed to a substantial reduction in poverty, and the worsening income distribution contributed to an increase in poverty. The adverse impact of worsening income distribution did not offset the massive reduction in poverty. The primary aim of this paper is to define and measure patterns of growth through poverty elasticity of income sources. It makes methodological contributions in the derivations of this elasticity. The paper analyzes the patterns of growth to Rural China in the period 2007-2013, utilizing the Household and Income Project (CHIP). The empirical results showed that the economic growth has been unfavorable to the poor. It amounted to a loss of almost 25% of growth rate. If China’s objective to eliminate poverty by 2020, such a degree of anti-poor growth should be of concern to the policy makers in China. The paper has drawn many policy conclusions. It has identified which policies are pro-poor, and which are not. And which policies can achieve a rapid reduction in poverty.
This study uses migrant household survey data from 2008 and 2009 to examine how parental migration decisions are associated with the nutritional status of children in rural and urban China. Results from instrumental variables regressions show a substantial adverse effect of children’s exposure to parental migration on height-for-age Z-scores of left-behind children relative to children who migrate with their parents. Additional results from a standard Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, a quantile decomposition, and a counterfactual distribution analysis all confirm that children who are left behind in rural villages – usually because of the oppressive hukou system – have poorer nutritional status than children who migrate with their parents, and the gaps are biggest at lower portions of the distribution.
多维贫困理念起源于阿玛蒂亚·森的“可行能力理论”,推广于《2010年人类发展报告》,目前已经在14个国家形成官方标准。中国尚未在官方层面使用多维贫困指数,但新世纪以来的减贫目标都充分体现了“多维”思想。本文的综述逻辑是:首先比较一维贫困和多维贫困的产生和发展历程,阐述了多维贫困的内涵、发展和常用的测算思路。然后,比较分析多维贫困的优势。接下来,以哥伦比亚、墨西哥和巴基斯坦的官方多维贫困指标体系为例,给出多维贫困的国际实践。最后,回到中国扶贫实践,简评多维思想在中国扶贫工作中的现实意义和应用前景。
随着工资水平的上扬和计算机技术的日臻成熟,计算机在工作岗位上的应用日益普遍。 根据新近的城市劳动力调查资料,58%的城市在岗职工在工作中需要使用计算机。在控制了个人特征、人力资本水平和工作任务属性等因素,并考虑了不可观测的特征可能产生的潜在影响后,我们发现使用计算机可以带来 12-15%的工资回报。使用企业-员工匹配调查数据的稳健性检验,仍然支持在工作中使用计算机会带来生产率提升的基本判断。计算机使用与劳动力市场的进一步结合有利于中国经济转向以生产率推动的经济增长模式,也有助于应对加速出现的老龄化进程。
借助多维贫困指标体系,本文旨在评估中国农村地区1995-2013年期间的扶贫工作效果。主要回答的问题包括:1995-2013年期间中国农村地区的多维贫困程度变动,分项指标对整体贫困的贡献,以及多维贫困状态间的差异。结论显示,伴随扶贫政策的深入,农村多维贫困程度不断下降;自费医疗支出负担对整体贫困造成的影响最大,贡献最高;老年群体、低受教育程度群体、西部地区和贫困县等子群体的贫困程度均很高。稳健性分析显示,改变子维度的代理变量、改变权重结构或去掉某些维度,本文结论仍然成立。
Adopting a simple demand system, we aim to re-estimate China.s income inequality using the Urban Household Survey (UHS) data assuming the expenditure data is well measured. We find income inequality growth exceeds the growth rate of consumption inequality, although income inequality is still lower than consumption inequality over the period 2003-2009. We also .nd that the increase of income inequality is mainly due to the increase of inequality between the middle expenditure group and the high expenditure group, while the income inequality between the middle-expenditure group and the low-expenditure group slightly decreases. This not only confirms the presence of pervasive grey income, also implying that grey incomes mostly exist in the high-expenditure stratum. Following Aguiar and Bils (2015), we assume that the Engel coeffcient is log-linear and that the income elasticities are constant over time. In the robustness test, we relax the assumptions and find that the estimation results are still robust.
利用微观面板数据,考察家庭房产价值变化对城镇居民非住房消费的影响,在此基础上对影响的作用机制和群体性差异行了研究。本文主要有以下发现:首先,房产价值变化正向显著影响消费,但量级较小,进一步来看长期比短期影响更为明显。其次,针对作用机制检验的研究发现,本文否认了直接财富效应和抵押品效应,同时支持了预防性储蓄动机。再次,进一步来看,预防性储蓄动机的发挥,在不同地域、不同房价地区和不同住房数量的人群中存在显著差异。
利用2013年中国家庭收入调查数据,本文考察了住房公积金制度的收入分配效应及其影响机制。结果表明,城镇居民在公积金的缴存、提取和贷款环节上存在明显差异,在公有制单位、垄断行业工作的管理和专业技术人员从中受益最多,公积金制度放大了他们既有的收入优势。在全部四种公积金影响居民收入的机制中,除因公积金强制储蓄而损失利息会缩小收入差距外,雇主为职工缴存公积金、职工因缴存公积金获得个人所得税减免、职工因使用公积金贷款而节省利息支出均显著地扩大了收入差距。公积金总体上显著提高了城镇收入不平等,使收入基尼系数上升约1.5个百分点。
Most poverty research has explored monetary poverty. This paper presents and analyses the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) estimations for China. Using China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find China’s global MPI was 0.035 in 2010 and decreased significantly to 0.017 in 2014. The dimensional composition of MPI suggests that nutrition, education, safe drinking water and cooking fuel contribute most to overall non-monetary poverty in China. Such analysis is also applied to sub-groups, including geographic areas (rural/urban, east/central/west, provinces), as well as social characteristics such as gender of the household heads, age, education level, marital status, household size, migration status, ethnicity, and religion. We find the level and composition of poverty differs significantly across certain subgroups. We also find high levels of mismatch between monetary and multidimensional poverty at the household level, which highlights the importance of using both complementary measures to track progress in eradicating poverty.
本文建立了中国公积金可计算一般均衡模型(CGE),将现实状况与“取消公积金”的反事实情形进行对比,研究了住房公积金与居民收入、居民消费、整体宏观经济的关系。主要基础数据是2009年城镇住户调查数据和2010年社会核算矩阵。文章包含理论分析和模型分析两个部分:首先,梳理了住房公积金分布的影响和可能产生的动态冲击,其中解释了公积金在一般均衡框架下的冲击机制,并建立了一个局部均衡分析框架,讨论住房公积金与企业人工成本的理论关系。其次,借助CGE模型模拟了“取消公积金”情形下经济系统的一般均衡状态,从数值角度了解住房公积金的冲击。研究发现:住房公积金在多数情况下会提高企业人工成本,不过,提高公积金的实际效用能够减缓它对人工成本的负面影响;取消公积金对可支配收入产生三个层次的影响,不同机制设计可能造成不同结果;2010年模型结果显示,取消公积金会降低整体可支配收入水平,但低收入家庭的可支配收入水平会增加,从而增加整体居民消费,拉动商品市场的需求,在一定程度上增加生产部门的总产出,并进一步增加居民的市场收入;取消公积金能够使得收入基尼系数和居民消费基尼系数分别下降2.06%和2.15%左右;公积金对收入不平等产生影响的主要原因是它主要被高收入家庭提取,而低收入家庭很难从公积金中获益。根据本文结果,公积金带来了一些负面影响,但也应看到它的积极意义,是否取消应慎重考虑;若以改良为改革方向,重点在于两个要点,一是如何让更多低收入家庭受益,二是如何提高公积金对于职工的实际效用。
China’s Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee program (Dibao) is the largest social safety-net program in the world. Given the scale and the popularity of Rural Dibao, it is necessary to rigorously evaluate it so that policymakers know the extent to which the program meets its intended objective of reducing poverty. This paper develops some new methods and uses data from the 2013 Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP2013) to examine the targeting performance of the rural Dibao program. The paper has found that the Rural Dibao program suffers from very low targeting accuracy, high exclusion error, and inclusion error, and yields a significant negative social rate of return. It discusses possible causes and argues that the fundamental mechanism has to be redesigned to increase the effectiveness of the program. The paper makes some recommendations to reform Dibao that will significantly improve targeting and reduce the cost of running the program. That will help China to achieve its goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2020.
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