Benefit Incidence of Public Transfers: Evidence from the People’s Republic of China

Shen Ke () and Sang-Hyop Lee
Additional contact information
Shen Ke: Demographic Research Institute, Fudan University

No 413, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: Benefit incidence analyses provide important insights into problems facing any government struggling to deliver essential and equitable social services. Utilizing the framework of the National Transfer Accounts Project, this paper analyzes the benefit incidence of public transfers across generations and socioeconomic groups in the People’s Republic of China in 2009. Public education transfers were equally distributed by residence, gender, and income groups at the primary and secondary levels but favored city dwellers, females, and the wealthy at the tertiary level. Public health-care programs tended to equally target the young and middle-aged from different socioeconomic groups but tilted toward urban dwellers, males, and higher income groups at older ages. Public pension spending strongly favored high-income groups, with rural residents, females, and lower income groups receiving greatly reduced benefits. Our results also indicate that total public spending favored elderly people as spending per person 65 years and older was twice that per child younger than 19. In the next 10 or 20 years, the government should endeavor to improve and strengthen public support systems. In addition to this effort, the currently fragmented health insurance system and pension system should move toward a unified system to reduce inequalities in benefit incidence across socioeconomic groups.

Keywords: benefit incidence; public transfers; the People’s Republic of China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H53 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2014-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cna, nep-ias, nep-pbe and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/benefit-incidence ... oples-republic-china Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:adbewp:0413

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().