走向共同富裕:再分配政策对收入分布的影响分析

A Path Towards Common Prosperity:The Effect of Redistribution Policies on Income Distribution

本文基于微观数据并构建反事实分解模型研究2010—2018年中国再分配政策的变化对收入分布的影响。研究发现,党的十八大以来,政府再分配调节职能进一步强化,城乡居民基本养老保险和公共转移支付政策的改革在提升中低收入家庭收入增长率、缩小收入分配差距方面取得了显著成果。机制分析发现,这一时期居民养老保险的再分配效果主要来自于其覆盖面的扩大,其次是养老金水平的提高。公共转移支付政策变化的效果则主要来自于对低收入群体更好的瞄准和支付水平的提升。政策模拟显示,若进一步增加居民养老保险和公共转移支付支出,提高覆盖面比增加给付水平具有更强的再分配效果。

Income inequality has always been a major concern for governments and the people.To combat rising income inequality in China,the Chinese government has launched a series of reforms and considerably strengthened redistribution since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.This article focuses on evaluating the distributional impacts of the three most important redistribution policies since then,including basic pension insurance for urban and rural residents,public transfers,and personal income tax.In this paper,we document and decompose changes in income distribution from 2010 to 2018,using data from the China Household Finance Surveys(CHFS).CHFS is a nationally representative dataset that collects detailed information on household demographics and different sources of income.Following Wimer et al.(2020),we first carefully document income growth rates by quantile of initial household income distribution in order to capture the changes in the full income distribution over the period 2010-2018.Our measure of inequality is better than traditional summary measures such as the Gini coefficient because it allows us to focus more on changes in the lower end of the income distribution,which is particularly relevant to China's recent campaign for“common prosperity”.We then develop a model to decompose the income distribution given different counterfactual scenarios to analyze the effect of the three redistribution policies collectively and individually.This exercise allows us to see which policies have contributed most to the changes in income distribution during the period 2010-2018.Furthermore,we simulate future policies to examine the effects of specific aspects of the policies on income distribution.The results provide important guidance for improving program designs with respect to future reforms of the redistribution policies.Our paper makes three contributions to the existing literature.Firstly,we have used a new measure of income distribution to investigate the latest changes in inequality in China over a relatively long period of time of almost a decade.The empirical results show that inequality of market income in China has continued to rise in the past decade,but that of total income has declined thanks to the strong redistribution efforts under the current administration.Secondly,using the decomposition method,we have identified the contributions of the redistribution policies to changes in income distribution.Our results show pension reform and changes in public transfer policies have played the most important role in the declining overall inequality.In addition,the redistribution effect of pension reform mainly came from the expansion of its coverage,followed by the increase in its benefit level.On the other hand,the effects of changes in public transfer policies mainly came from the more generous payments and better targeting of low-income households.Lastly,our policy simulations suggest that if the government aims to further strengthen redistribution by increasing total expenditures on basic pensions and public transfers,it would be more effective to increase program participation and targeting rather than the level of payments in order to achieve better redistribution outcomes.Finally,we would like to emphasize that our counterfactual decomposition analysis is only a mechanical accounting exercise that does not fully take consideration into behavioral changes of households in response to changes in the redistribution policies.Theoretically,policy changes not only directly affect household redistributed income,but also may induce behavioral changes such as changes in labor supplies.However,we believe that this concern would not substantially change our main conclusion drawn in this paper.Given that current levels of pension and public transfer payments for urban and rural residents and the average tax rate in China are still relatively low,existing studies generally find that changes in redistribution policies have very limited influence on household labor supply decisions.We leave a more comprehensive and deeper study of these issues for future research.