A Macro Analysis of China Pension Pooling System: Incentive Issues and Financial Problem

Over a decade-long of pension reform in China has became much more critical in recent years. Problems of pension reform have started to reveal rapidly and pension reform pace has apparently slowed down. One sign of this is the decision made by the government to suspend a sell off of state-held shares in listed companies to fund the pension shortfall in October of 2001. The pension system built on 1995-reform platform has run into three major problems. First is a huge amount of unfunded pension liabilities inherited from the old system, and second is fragmentation of pension system has increased difficulty to finance pension liabilities. Third is a lack of a capital market to invest pension fund for a higher rate of return. These problems were rooted in the beginning of the pension reform and crippled effective operation of provincial pooling system over the years. And related resulting effects are rising pension deficit, accumulating notional individual accounts, increasing enterprise noncompliance and evasions, declining program participation, continuing financial burden of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and a fast increase in SOEs retirements, and increasing weakness in central government fiscal conditions. This paper focuses on the incentive problems under the provincial pooling arrangement and aims to understand on a macro-level how adverse effects of the incapability of separation the new system from the old pension liabilities have complicated pension reform process and generated a series of unintended reform problems. The study uses aggregate data from national statistical sources and published data by domestic analysts to analyze incentive issues of state and nonstate sector in the pooling system. The paper answered the three questions. How did individual accounts become notional in the recent years? Why are there widespread noncompliance and evasions among state-owned enterprises toward pension contribution? Why is the non-state sector representing only a small share in provincial pooling pension program? The evidences indicate that current provincial pooling system is in a vicious cycle, financial problems are serious and public confidence in the system is low. Declining share of state sector and low share of non-state sector in contributing to pension program at local levels show that government's approach of expanding pension coverage to solve pension fund shortage at least in short term is ineffective. The government is facing a stark dilemma. Incapable of separating the old pension liability from the current pension financing system has led to an accumulation of unfunded individual accounts. The unfunded pension system and lack of capital accumulation of pension fund have shaken the confidence of current contributors of state enterprises and scares away new contributors from private and foreign invested enterprises. However, limited coverage, low program participation and widespread noncompliance and evasion reduce its pension revenue collection, increase financing gap and in fact double the difficulty to finance the liability, and that would further scare away new contributors too. Caught between the rock and a hard place, the government will have to figure out the approach and structure a reform path that follows pension reform sequencing. First to solve the old pension liabilities through pushing for financial capital market development or by ensuring some sort of central government responsibility. Second, to build the public confidence in the success of the pension system and gain the cooperation and willingness of pubic and private interest in the system. With that in mind, the pension reform outcomes will be both credible and financially viable.

TROM: A Testing-based Method for Finding Transcriptomic Similarity of Biological Samples

Comparative transcriptomics has gained increasing popularity in genomic research thanks to the development of high-throughput technologies including microarray and next-generation RNA sequencing that have generated numerous transcriptomic data. An important question is to understand the conservation and differentiation of biological processes in different species. We propose a testing-based method TROM (Transcriptome Overlap Measure) for comparing transcriptomes within or between different species, and provide a different perspective to interpret transcriptomic similarity in contrast to traditional correlation analyses. Specifically, the TROM method focuses on identifying associated genes that capture molecular characteristics of biological samples, and subsequently comparing the biological samples by testing the overlap of their associated genes. We use simulation and real data studies to demonstrate that TROM is more powerful in identifying similar transcriptomes and more robust to stochastic gene expression noise than Pearson and Spearman correlations. We apply TROM to compare the developmental stages of six Drosophila species, C. elegans, S. purpuratus, D. rerio and mouse liver, and find interesting correspondence patterns that imply conserved gene expression programs in the development of these species. The TROM method is available as an R package on CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/) with manuals and source codes available at http://www.stat.ucla.edu/ jingyi.li/software-and-data/trom.html

Rising Wages: Has China Lost Its Global Labor Advantage?

We document dramatic rising wages in China for the period 1978-2007 based on multiple sources of aggregate statistics. Although real wages increased seven-fold during the period, growth was uneven across ownership types, industries and regions. Since the late 1990s, the wages of state-owned enterprises have increased rapidly and wage disparities between skill-intensive and labor-intensive industries have widened. Comparisons of international data show that China's manufacturing wage has already converged to that of Asian emerging markets, but China still enjoys enormous labor cost advantages over its neighboring developed economies. Our analysis suggests that China's wage growth will stabilize to a moderate pace in the near future.wage growth, aggregate statistics, China, international comparison

Facilitating Social Inclusion of Migrant Workers through Digital Game Play

With the accelerated and large-scale im/migration around the world, many countries face issues of integration of migrants into the host societies. Anxiety created by the continuing economic crisis and declining state welfare contribute to antipathy towards foreign population. Social exclusion is particularly a struggle for those who migrate with unstable statuses as transient workers, refugees, and asylum seekers. To promote social inclusion, this paper first introduces the concept of cultural citizenship grounded in the ethics of care and empathy to approach social inclusion. It further argues that social inclusion can be facilitated through technology use, particularly digital game play. A Facebook game is subsequently designed based on the theoretical lenses to foster cultural citizenship and integration between migrant workers and local Singaporean society

Hire Up

Hire Up is a video game designed to foster positive intergroup perceptions toward immigrants. The game seeks to highlight the importance of treating everyone with respect and equality, regardless of their cultural background. The game is set in a fictional food establishment where players assume the role of the owner, who manages day-to-day operations of various food stalls. The goal of the game is to make sufficient profits to sustain the business. One major task is the hiring and management of human resources. Players are presented with the background of workers during the hiring phase, which includes their age, gender, race, and nationality. Players click on the workers’ avatars to interact and know their thoughts and emotions as the game progresses. The main narrative of the game involves scenarios that require moral decision-making as well as casual conversations between players and the workers’ avatars. For example, players have to decide between acknowledging a customer’s distasteful comments toward their worker or defending their worker at the expense of losing in-game credits. Dialogues are triggered by workers or customers. At the end of each dialogue, a non-player character “friend” appears and asks players about their thoughts about the situation to prompt players to reflect upon the issues. Players are presented with the consequences of their choices, which reflect their workers’ state of psychological well-being at the end of the game

Immuno-Anti-Infective Drug Design Using BioAI

According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today. A growing number of infections, like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, are becoming harder to treat as the antibiotics used to treat them become less effective. As a result, the primary concern for infections in the hospital setting is due to the S. aureus’s growing resistance to antibiotics. Therefore, in response to this global health threat, our project focuses on furthering the research in developing a drug that S. aureus will not develop resistance to. In this paper, we assess NPY-Y2 as a potential immuno-anti-infective drug target to prevent the activation of Sortase A on S. aureus. We have shown that NPY-Y2 is a potential drug target; however, further invasion assay experiments need to be conducted for more reliable verification. In a larger scheme, our hope is that the approach of this research will allow for the development of other anti-infective drugs for other bacteria

The Cost Competitiveness of Manufacturing in China and India - An Industry and Regional Perspective

This paper focuses on comparisons of productivity, (unit) labor cost and industry level competitiveness for the manufacturing sector of China and India. We first provide a comparison between India and China using a broad international perspective. We find that China has increased its labor productivity to a level above that of India, but due to a somewhat higher compensation level, China is still somewhat at a disadvantage in terms of unit labor cost in manufacturing relative to India. In the second half of the paper, we make an analysis of industry level differences in productivity, labor compensation and unit labor costs at state and province level in the two countries from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s. We find rapid declines in unit labor cost across industries and provinces in China, but increases in many instances in India. This suggest that productivity and compensation growth have become much more aligned across regions in China whereas this is not (yet) the case in India. We relate these results to differences in the implementation of market reforms between the two countries and removal of barriers to resource mobility eradicating inefficient manufacturing activity.cost competitiveness, manufacturing, India, China, Labor Productivity

International gaming: comparative survey research on digital gaming

Computer and console gaming has become a major entertainment sector around the globe. Still, the diffusion rates and the general acceptance of gaming vary between countries. There is some anecdotal evidence that there are countries and regions which are more open to technological advancement and gaming in particular. However, until now, researchers had to rely mostly on market research and industry information when trying to identify the state of gaming in their respective countries. In a unique effort to solve the problem of missing cross-national research, this panel brings together several international teams of researchers, presenting several large-scale surveys in a comparative manner