The document summarizes two papers that aim to allocate national accounts figures for social transfers to individuals or households. The Chinese paper examines three groups - rural, urban, and migrant households - and estimates the social welfare benefits received from minimum livelihood guarantees, health insurance, and education. It finds that while health reinforces urban-rural disparities, education significantly improves the position of rural households. The Dutch paper incorporates microdata into national accounts by using a virtual register to match individuals to households and estimates health costs and household consumption at the individual level. It examines the implications and challenges of mapping individuals to households for national accounts.

1. Three worlds of the Chinese welfare
system: Do health and education
change the picture?
Qin Gao, Sui Yang,Yalu Zhang, Shi LI

2. Households and individuals: two
sides of the same coin
Arjan Bruil and Florin Barb

3. Both papers
• Aim to allocate national accounts figures for
social transfers in kind to individuals or
households

4. Chinese paper
NA figures
Augment
survey
results
Figures for
the
population

5. Dutch paper
NA figures
Households Individuals

6. Chinese paper
• Three groups of households
–Rural
–Urban
–Migrant
• Those who have moved from rural to
urban

7. Earlier studies
• Urban social benefits similar to western
industrialized countries
• Rural similar to least developed countries
• Migrants in between
• BUT education STIK completely excluded,
health STIK not fully captured

8. Forms of social welfare
• Minimum livelihood guarantee (Dibao) for
poor urban families – expanded to rural
families in 2007
• Health insurance – Urban mix of free,
compulsory and optional; rural voluntary
• Education – compulsory but urban spend
higher than rural

9. Estimation
• Allocate health spend by province according
number of participants in insurance schemes
• Add to expenses covered by government or
employers (reimbursement?)
• Education – problem early and higher so use
four levels, elementary to vocational high
school, urban to rural costs 1.11, 1.25, 1.43

10. Survey size – CHIP Insurance programs
• Urban -10,235
households
• Rural – 13,000
households
• Migrant – 5,000
households
• Urban -270 million
• Rural – 820 million
• Migrant – ?

11. Results
Urban Rural Migrant
Market income 11,567 4,583 11,400
Self-reported social benefits 2,802 102 1,498
Imputed health 389 53 58
Imputed education 447 456 233
Private transfers 570 101 165
Taxes and fees -966 -14 -76
Final household income 14,809 5,281 13,278

12. Households to individuals
• Use OECD convention of square root of
household size
• Average household size
• Urban – 3
• Rural – 4
• Migrant – 2
– Question of where children of migrants count for
education

13. Conclusions
• Health reinforces urban-rural split
• Education significantly improves the position
• Social benefits still has almost negligible effect
on reducing urban/rural disparity

14. Comments
• Rather brief discussion on impact by deciles
using Gini coefficients only
• More would be interesting – which urban
decile does top rural decile match?
• Other measures eg Palma indices?

15. Dutch paper
• Incorporate micro data into national accounts
• Register of individuals and of households
• Wealth and household consumption at
household level only
• Income panel survey gives both but no
imputed items
• STIK are at individual level only

16. Virtual register
• Identify individuals by characteristics such as
age, marital status, gender, type of household
• Household characteristics such as age of head,
number of members
• Even if only have a survey of households,
could do similar matching

17. Health care costs - Ind to Hh
• Figure 1: costs high at birth, decline sharply,
slowly rise to end of life
• Women have higher costs in child-bearing
years, men at end of life
• With data for 2007 can estimate patterns for
2009
• Later combine with actual 2009

18. Consumption – Hh to Ind
• Equivalence scales – translate HH figures to
individuals, show by male/female
• Figure 6 shows significant differences when
head =1, other adult = 0.5 because man is
often taken to be the head

19. Where does this analysis lead?
• Gives a useful distributional dimension to STIK
• Does this lead on to show the consequences
for consumption?
• Is there feedback to other parts of national
accounts or is this just a supplementary table?

20. Suppose mapping individuals to
households not possible
• Employees are individuals, STIK usually for
individuals
• Consumption for households, property
income may be also
• SAMs long predate Stiglitz, Sen, Fitoussi but
have major discontinuity between
employment and consumption without a
mapping from individuals to households

21. Questions
• Would this work in other countries?
• Size
– Netherlands population 16.8 million
– China -1,366.3 million??
• Other issues
– UK population – 64 million (?59 million!)
– Resistance to registers
• More on “virtual registers”