Public Pension and Household Saving:
Evidence from urban China

Jin Feng
Lixin He
Hiroshi Sato

February 2009

Abstract

We relate household saving to pension reform, to explain the high household saving rates in urban China from a new perspective. We use the exogenous – policy induced - variation in pension wealth to explicitly estimate the impact of pension wealth on household saving, and obtain a significant offset effect of pension wealth on household saving. Our estimations show that pension reform boosted the household saving rate in 1999 by about 6 percentage points for cohort aged 25-29 and by about 3 percentage points for cohort aged 50-59. Our results also indicate that declining pension wealth reduces expenditure on education and health more than on other consumption items.

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