A Study on Fiscal Risk of China’s Employees Basic Pension System under Longevity Risk

Abstract

It is generally accepted that China’s Employees Basic Pension System (CEBPS) cannot cover its expenses. The government needs to fill the gap in income and expenditure with fiscal revenue to ensure sustainability of the system, which may cause it to take fiscal risk caused by the volatility of the fund gap. In this article, through the establishment of a prediction model for the income and expenditure of CEBPS with dynamic mortality, we aimed to measure the fiscal risk caused by longevity risk and provide policy basis for the government. We found that longevity risk leads to serious fiscal risk. The income and expenditure gap of CEBPS fluctuates greatly, and the 2.5% and 97.5% quantiles of fund balance in 2067 are 1.52 and 0.44 times the expected value, respectively. The knock-on effect of fiscal risk, measured by value-at-risk (VaR), is 1.15 times gross domestic product and 4.75 times state fiscal expenditure in 2020. In this article, we not only calculate the expected value like the other literatures but also discuss the volatility of the CEBPS fund gap.