Abstract
In 2009, the Chinese government began introducing the New Rural Pension System (NRPS). The goal has been to rapidly extend pension coverage for rural residents who currently make up 45% of the total population. In 2008 less than 70 million out of 730 million rural residents were covered by any sort of pension and even a smaller fraction of those age 60 and over were receiving pensions. Most of the elderly were, entirely dependent on support from their children, land, and personal savings. During the following six years, NRPS coverage was successfully extended to cover 477 million by the end of 2014, achieving coverage for about 77 per cent of the rural population and pension benefits were by then being paid to almost the entire rural population over age 60. This entirely new program in just six years grew to cover more people, than any other pension program in the world. In this poster (and the related paper) describe the huge success of the NRPS, but the focus will be on the needed next steps, merging the rural pension scheme with a similar urban pension scheme and several other reforms under discussion by pension policy analysts that could help deal with some of current and likely future limitations of the current scheme. We will emphasize proposals for dealing with the issues of adequacy (which is currently big problem), coverage, (which could become a big problem) and sustainability (which could also become a big problem) in the decades ahead.