With the background of population-aging and the mission of constructing a harmonious society, this chapter studies the impact of social pension reforms on income distribution. This chapter begins with examining international experiences of public pension's function on income distribution, and reviewing China's pre-reform urban retirement system and its inequality consequences. Then the urban workers' basic pension scheme is described and analyzed, focusing on its achievements on changing the distributional framework and its shortcomings with respect to local funds pooling, discouraging low income people's participation, and some other issues. The relations between other social pension schemes and income distribution are also discussed. The main conclusion is that the effects of social pension reforms on income distribution at present are less obvious due to many reasons, including early stage of developing, localized administration, lack of integrative reform and policy design. Taking income distribution into consideration, therefore, is necessary for academic and policy research.
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