L'Impact de l'Adhésion de la Chine à l'OMC sur la Réforme du Système de Retraites: une Analyse en Equilibre Général Calculable

The Chinese demographic transition involves, within a few decades, a critical problem of sustainability of pension system. The current system is more or less a PAYGO system. The current reform, based on the World Bank advices of the end of the 90’s, seems to be not ambitious enough. The problem of the pension burden of the state owned enterprises is urgent and immediate. The longer-term problem arises from the rapid aging of the population. Without a courageous but painful reform, the Chinese pension system will not be able to give a decent life to the elderly. This fact is shown by the CGE model we built for China. Even in the case of the World Bank’s “three pillars”, the pension system is not sustainable without a minimum increase of 50% in the contribution rate, and a cut of 30% of the wage replacement rate. Whatever the situation, the state budget constraint is one of the main issues of the reform. The recent accession of China to the WTO involves a severe cut in the tariffs rates. That will worsen the problem of the budget deficit. The aim of this paper is to estimate the burden of the WTO accession for the government budget, and to compare this to the burden of the pension reform. The estimations are done with a dynamic CGE model of China (over 20 years). We’ll see that the budget problem due to the WTO accession is a short-term problem, almost negligible compared to the budget and long term problem of pension reform.