Security for the Working-age Population:Current Status,Effectiveness,and International Comparison
Enhancing the social security system is a critical pathway to achieving common prosperity.However,current research on social security in China may overlook the differences among the secured population.This paper examines China's social security system and redistribution effects by categorizing the secured population into working-age and retirement-age groups,and compares them with international experience.The paper posits that the working-age population,characterized by employment and human capital investment,faces significant market shocks to their employment and market income,encountering higher income risks.There is a temporal mismatch between labor income and the demand for human capital investment in family contexts.According to the Heckman Curve,the returns on human capital investment are higher in early childhood,indicating a greater demand for investment in the early stages of a child's development.However,during this period,parents are also in the early stages of their career development,where employment quality and income levels are typically lower according to the age-wage profile.This leads to a period mismatch between parents'income and their children's human capital investment needs,which is one of the fundamental sources of security needs for the working-age population.Therefore,emphasizing the security of the working-age group can extend the goal from subsistence to human capital investment security.China's current social security system focuses on basic security and consumption smoothing throughout the life cycle.To further expand the scope of security and increase the intensity of redistribution,it is necessary to provide working-age people with more protective payments and to include the investment in the human capital of families.By categorizing the secured population into two groups,this paper analyzes China's security system,scales,and redistribution effects and compares them with international experience.The findings reveal that China's social security system currently exhibits insufficiencies in the security scale and items for the working-age population,weak redistribution effects,and a mismatch between the level of security and families'economic status.These may lead to underinvestment in the human capital of families and weaken intergenerational mobility,hindering the achievement of the common prosperity goal both statically and dynamically.This paper suggests that the reform of China's social security policy should focus on expanding security for working-age families,increasing security items for the working-age population,and optimizing the institutional design of security items.Security policies should comprehensively consider the human capital investment needs of working-age families,emphasize incentive mechanisms,and improve targeting efficiency in policy design to avoid welfare dependency and enhance the redistribution efficiency of social security.
social securityworking-age populationincentive mechanismhuman capital investmentredistribution
万方数据
维普
