Do public pension programmes reduce elderly poverty in China?

Anqi Zhang and Katsushi Imai

Review of Development Economics, 2024, vol. 28, issue 1, 3-33

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of public programmes aiming to cover the entire population in China on elderly poverty in both rural and urban China. Using the three rounds of panel data based on the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study in 2011–2015, we examine whether public pension programmes reduced elderly poverty, comprehensively defined to cover both unidimensional and multidimensional poverty indices of the households and individuals. To utilise the longitudinal nature of the data, we apply the robust fixed‐effects (FE) model with propensity score matching (PSM) and the FE quantile model with PSM taking into account the unobservable individual characteristics. Our results show that public pension programmes reduced poverty in monetary and non‐monetary terms in rural areas, while the effect on labour market is not significant. The panel quantile regression results suggest that the programmes decreased inequality in both monetary and non‐monetary dimensions. However, poverty‐reducing and inequality‐reducing effects are not observed in urban areas. Our results provide strong evidence to underscore the success of the Chinese public pension programme in reducing poverty and inequality in both rural and urban areas.

Date: 2024
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