时间：2016年4月11日下午14:00-16:00

地点：国发院小教室

主持人：刘国恩

主讲人： Scott Rozelle（Stanford University）；赵忠（中国人民大学）

 

Topic 1：The Inequality of Human Capital among China’s Children, the Role of Poor Health and Malnutrition and China’s Future Growth and Stability

 

Abstract： China’s Gini today means that China’s income distribution is one of the most unequal in the world!! It also is rising extremely fast at a time when other middle income countries are experiencing falling inequality. But, the focus on income equality today may be missing the factors that will determine equality in the next generation (the time when growth will be lower and when large inequities in the population might really create serious friction and instability). One of the largest sources of inequality in the future is the inequality of human capital among young cohorts today. The overall goal of the presentation will be to document China human capital inequality gaps for children ages 6 months to college age. To meet this goal, the presentation will draw on numerous sources of data and spells of field work. We will look at gaps in health, nutrition and education. In addition—and perhaps more importantly, we will look at ways that have been shown to shrink the inequality. The efforts will be looked at in terms of efficacy and cost effectiveness and scalability. Barriers to implementing the solutions by policy makers will also be discussed.

 

Speaker：Scott Rozelle holds the Helen Farnsworth Endowed Professorship at Stanford University and is Senior Fellow in the Food Security and Environment Program and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies. For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In recent years Rozelle spends most of his time co-directing the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner.

 

Topic 2：The Health Implications of Social Pensions: Evidence from China's New Rural Pension Scheme

 

Abstract: This paper estimates the causal effect of income on health outcomes of the elderly and investigates underlying mechanisms by exploiting an income change induced by the launch of China's New Rural Pension scheme (NRPS). Using this policy experiment, we address the endogeneity of pension income by applying a fixed-effect model with instrumental variable correction. The results reveal that pension enrollment and income from the NRPS both have had a beneficial impact on objective measures of physical health, cognitive function, and psychological well-being of the rural elderly, and also reduced mortality over a three-year horizon by 6 percentage points. Evidence further suggests that pension recipients respond to the new pension income in multiple ways: improved nutrition intake, better accessibility to health care, increased informal care, increased leisure activities, and better self-perceived relative economic situation. These in turn act as channels from pension income to health of the Chinese rural elderly.

 

Speaker：赵忠，中国人民大学劳动人事学院副院长，教授，博士生导师。1991年毕业于中国人民大学国际经济系，获经济学学士学位，2002年获美国约翰霍普金斯大学(The Johns Hopkins University)经济学博士学位。    加入人民大学前，赵忠是德国劳动研究所(波恩)(IZA, Bonn)的高级研究员(Senior Research Associate)。他还曾在云南省财政厅和北京大学工作过，并在美国南加州大学、荷兰丁伯根研究所和英国诺丁汉大学做过访问。赵忠的研究兴趣包括劳动经济学、公共政策与社会项目评估、应用微观计量经济学、卫生经济学和中国经济。他的研究成果发表在《经济研究》、《经济学季刊》、《管理世界》、《世界经济》、Review of Economics and Statistics、Journal of Population Economics、Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A)、Review of Income and Wealth和Economics Letters等国内外期刊上。