China's pension system Dorfman, Mark C; Holzmann, Robert; O’Keefe, Philip ...
2012., 2013, 02-26-2013, 2013-02-27, 2012-12-15, 20120101
eBook, Book
Open access
China is at a critical juncture in its economic transition. A comprehensive reform of its pension and social security systems is an essential element of a strategy aimed toward achieving a harmonious ...society and sustainable development. Among policy makers, a widely held view is that the approach to pension provision and reform efforts piloted over the last 10-15 years is insufficient to enable China's economy and population to realize its development objectives in the years ahead. This volume suggests a national pension system that no longer distinguishes along urban and rural locational or hukou lines yet takes account of the diverse nature of employment relations and capacity of individuals to make contributions. This volume is organized as follows: the main text outlines this vision, focusing on summarizing the key features of a proposed long-term pension system. It first examines key trends motivating the need for reform then outlines the proposed three-pillar design and the rationale behind the design choices. It then moves on to examine financing options. The text continues by discussing institutional reform issues, and the final section concludes. The six appendixes provide additional analytical detail supporting the findings in the main text. The pension system design can play an important role in supporting or constraining such economic and demographic transitions: 1) fragmentation and lack of portability of rights hinder labor market efficiency and contribute to coverage gaps; 2) multiple schemes for salaried workers, civil servants, and, in some areas, migrants similarly impact labor markets; 3) legacy costs that are largely financed through current pension contributions weaken incentives for compliance and accurate wage reporting; 4) very limited risk pooling and interurban resource transfers limit the insurance function of the urban pension system and create spatial disparities in old-age income protection; 5) low retirement ages affect incentives and benefits and undermine fiscal sustainability; and 6) relatively low returns on individual accounts result in replacement rates significantly less than anticipated while at the macro level, are likely to inhibit wider efforts to stimulate higher domestic consumption.
All of the former transition economies
in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe (CESE) inherited
from the era of central planning traditional defined-benefit
pension systems financed on a ...pay-as-you-go basis. Like many
pay-as-you-go public pension systems elsewhere in the world,
CESE pension systems were in need of reforms to address
short-term fiscal imbalances and longer-term issues relating
to population aging. Reforms were also needed to adjust
benefit and contribution structures to meet the challenges
of-as well as to take advantage of opportunities relating to
the transition to a market economy, including the widespread
adoption of multiplier designs with improved risk-sharing
across funded and unfunded pillars. By 2006, most countries
in Europe and Central Asia had introduced a voluntary
private pension scheme. By 2008, 14 countries roughly half
of all countries in the region had legislated mandatory
private pension schemes, and all but one of those schemes
(the one in Ukraine) had been introduced. These reforms
shared a number of common objectives, in particular putting
the systems on a sounder financial footing and better
aligning them with the (very different) incentives of a
market economy. This report is organized as follows. The
first section discusses the motivation for reform across the
eight countries included in the study against the backdrop
of the regional (and global) trend toward multiplier pension
arrangements. The second section summarizes the key
provisions of the reformed systems in the eight countries
within the World Bank's five-pillar framework for
pension system design. The third section summarizes pension
system performance against the two crucially important
dimensions of adequacy and sustainability. The last section
provides some policy recommendations for addressing gaps in
reforms and taking advantage of further opportunities.
The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very ...different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.
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The aggravation of the global warming crisis, due to excessive consumption of traditional energy, urgently calls for the strategic goal of sustainable development. This study addresses endogeneity ...concerns by employing panel fixed effect and DID models, employing panel data from China's provincial green finance index spanning from 2016 to 2021. The empirical findings indicate that: (1) the impact of the new energy industry on environmental and economic benefits is more pronounced in inland areas characterized by lower GDP and smaller population size; (2) this effect is driven by green technological innovation, government incentive policies, and job creation. Drawing upon these results, this paper offers a range of pertinent recommendations at governmental, industrial, and societal levels to foster sustainable development, thereby enhancing social welfare.
•We address endogeneity concerns by employing panel fixed effect and DID models.•New energy industry development contributes to environmental and economic benefits.•The impact of the new energy industry is more pronounced in inland areas.•The effect is driven by CO2 reductions, incentive policies, and job creation.
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5.
Climate policy co-benefits: a review Karlsson, Mikael; Alfredsson, Eva; Westling, Nils
Climate policy,
03/2020, Volume:
20, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Concern over mitigation costs impedes the adoption of the climate policies needed to achieve agreed global warming targets. While costs are important to consider, so are benefits. However, the ...evidence for climate policy co-benefits, that is, the benefits in addition to avoided climate change costs, is commonly overlooked in policy-making. In many areas, the research is limited and not comprehensively synthesised. This article counters that problem and reviews 239 peer-reviewed articles, selected from 1,749 hits from a literature search covering 'co-benefits' and related terms. Aiming to aid policy-makers and to identify research gaps, we structure, describe, analyse and synthesize the rapidly expanding knowledge on climate policy co-benefits. Improved air quality is the co-benefit category dominating the literature, but studies covering a broad geographic range also focus on diet, physical activity, soil and water quality, biodiversity, economic performance, and energy security. In these areas, co-benefits are shown to be of substantial economic value, regarding air quality often of the same order of magnitude as mitigation costs, in some instances even larger. However, the share of studies quantifying or monetizing co-benefits is limited, and the empirical evidence is small, in particular for areas besides air quality and health. Furthermore, the knowledge is seldom used in policy-making, meaning that decision-making is often biased and overly concerned with costs, leading to suboptimal climate policies and goal failures. Evidently, more research is needed, as well as improved decision-making. Understanding and acting on climate policy co-benefits can promote policies that better mitigate climate change and improve overall welfare.
Key policy insights
Climate policy co-benefits in well-researched fields such as air quality and health are large, often equalling or exceeding mitigation costs.
Despite their significance, co-benefits are seldom considered in decision-making, leading to biased policies and goal failures.
In several areas, such as diet and energy security, co-benefits are sparsely researched, but emerging evidence points to high values.
More research is needed, including on how to describe the total value of different co-benefits.
Improved processes, documentation requirements and criteria in decision-making are needed, in order to ensure that political decision-makers consider co-benefits.
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The literature on treatment effects focuses on gross benefits from program participation. We extend this literature by developing conditions under which it is possible to identify parameters ...measuring the cost and net surplus from program participation. Using the generalized Roy model, we nonparametrically identify the cost, benefit, and net surplus of selection into treatment without requiring the analyst to have direct information on costs. We apply our methodology to estimate the gross benefit and net surplus of attending college.
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Information and communication technology (ICT) projects for organizational development deal with market challenges, information handling, and the integration of multiple information systems (IS) in ...an organization. This research investigates how ICT projects (IS systems, etc.) affect the strategic, social, and human development in an organization. Previous studies have highlighted the advantages of ICT portfolio management techniques and return on investment approaches; the current research focused primarily on measuring business value on investment perspective. Therefore, based on the findings from the literature review, an integrated framework was proposed and validated using the case study in Saudi Arabia to evaluate the effects of ICT/IS projects from a managerial perspective. The framework consisted of a list of processes, criteria, and sub-criteria for different kinds of extracted features to measure the impact of ICT/IS projects. Our findings demonstrated that the effects of ICT projects are not limited to social and economic development, but are also categorized as strategic, managerial, informational, operational, transactional, organizational, infrastructure, and transformational development. It is hoped that the findings of the current study can inform ICT decision makers, experts, and researchers who have investigated and are doing research in this area.
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This paper focuses on the benefits that organizations may achieve from their investment in enterprise systems (ES). It proposes an ES benefit framework for summarizing benefits in the years after ...ES implementation. Based on an analysis of the features of enterprise systems, on the literature on information technology (IT) value, on data from 233 enterprise systems vendor‐reported stories published on the Web and on interviews with managers of 34 organizations using ES, the framework provides a detailed list of benefits that have reportedly been acquired through ES implementation. This list of benefits is consolidated into five benefits dimensions: operational, managerial, strategic, IT infrastructure and organizational, and illustrated using perceived net benefit flow (PNBF) graphs. In a detailed example, the paper shows how the framework has been applied to the identification of benefits in a longitudinal case study of four organizations.
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Abstract
We examine the net benefits of social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19 in USA. Social distancing saves lives but imposes large costs on society due to reduced economic activity. We ...use epidemiological and economic forecasting to perform a rapid benefit–cost analysis of controlling the COVID-19 outbreak. Assuming that social distancing measures can substantially reduce contacts among individuals, we find net benefits of about $5.2 trillion in our benchmark case. We examine the magnitude of the critical parameters that might imply negative net benefits, including the value of statistical life and the discount rate. A key unknown factor is the speed of economic recovery with and without social distancing measures in place. A series of robustness checks also highlight the key role of the value of mortality risk reductions and discounting in the analysis and point to a need for effective economic stimulus when the outbreak has passed.
Faced with numerous potential catastrophes—nuclear and bioterrorism, mega-viruses, climate change, and others—which should society attempt to avert? A policy to avert one catastrophe considered in ...isolation might be evaluated in cost-benefit terms. But because society faces multiple catastrophes, simple cost-benefit analysis fails: even if the benefit of averting each one exceeds the cost, we should not necessarily avert them all. We explore the policy interdependence of catastrophic events, and develop a rule for determining which catastrophes should be averted and which should not.
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