Speaker
Dr. Jue Tang, Associate Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, and Director of the Social Security Department, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Moderator
Dr. Hong Liu, Professor, Department of Social Security, School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China

Lecture Time
June 5, 2025 (Thursday), 13:00–14:30

Venue
Room 347, Qiu Shi Building

Speaker Biography

Jue Tang is an Associate Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, and Director of the Social Security Department at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His research focuses on pension and unemployment insurance systems, particularly reforms in social security financing and their impacts on corporate investment, employment, individual consumption, and labor market behavior. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as Economic Research Journal, Management World, China Economic Quarterly, Journal of Financial Research, The World Economy, Economic Perspectives, and Journal of Asian Economics. He has led or participated in multiple national and ministerial-level research projects on social security and authored policy advisory reports endorsed by central and provincial-level policymakers. In 2024, he was awarded the 7th Hong Yinxing Economics Prize (Youth Category) for his outstanding contributions.

Lecture Introduction

To address regional imbalances in China's employee pension system and enhance its sustainability, the government introduced an interprovincial pension fund adjustment mechanism. However, this study finds that the adjustment system has led local governments to reduce social insurance collection efforts, lowering corporate contribution rates by 0.23 percentage points. While full-responsibility collection by tax authorities can mitigate this issue, delegated collection proves ineffective. Post-2022 data shows persistent lax enforcement, indicating that merely integrating local systems into the national pooling framework fails to resolve information asymmetry between central and local governments or align their fiscal incentives. The adjustment system also increases local pension expenditures, driven by rising beneficiary numbers and benefit levels, with notable behavioral differences between net-contributing and net-receiving regions. Additionally, local governments tend to relax non-tax revenue collection under the adjustment system. These findings reveal moral hazard risks in nationwide pension pooling due to central-local information gaps, posing challenges to long-term sustainability. Aligned with the Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee’s call to refine the nationwide pooling system, this research provides insights for policy optimization.

Faculty and students are warmly welcome to attend!