A Study On The Influence Of Social Security Expenditure On The Income Gap Between Urban And Rural Residents In China

China’s economic strength has been steadily improved and the national living standard has been qualitatively improved since the reform and opening up.However,the continuous widening of urban-rural income gap has become a key factor hindering the further development of society and economy.This factor is not only the embodiment of China’s unbalanced and insufficient development,but also a huge obstacle to maintaining social fairness and justice in development.Therefore,narrowing the gap is the key to realizing a better and happy life for our people.Social security expenditure is an important means to adjust the income gap.It realizes the reallocation of resources by intervening in each distribution stage,and plays an important role in narrowing the income gap.This paper uses the national fiscal data from 2007 to 2019 to establish a panel model.Through fixed effect analysis,heterogeneity analysis and threshold effect analysis,this paper studies the impact of the overall social security expenditure and various expenditure items,including social insurance,social welfare,social relief and preferential care and resettlement,on the income gap in different regions and at different levels of economic development.The study found that:(1)Social security expenditure as a whole and various specific expenditure items have a weak positive regulatory effect on the income gap between urban and rural residents;(2)The influence degree of each specific expenditure item on the income gap is different,and the effect intensity from strong to weak is: social insurance expenditure,social assistance expenditure,social welfare expenditure and preferential care and resettlement expenditure;(3)There are regional differences in the impact of social security expenditure on the income gap.The income redistribution effect of social security expenditure and itemized expenditure in the eastern region is significantly better than that in the central and western regions.The income redistribution effect of social security expenditure and social insurance expenditure in the central region is better than that in the western region,while the income redistribution effect of social welfare,social assistance and preferential care and resettlement expenditure in the western region is better than that in the central region;(4)Under different levels of economic development,the impact of social security expenditure on the income gap between urban and rural residents is different.For high-income provincial and municipal groups,there is no phased threshold effect of social security expenditure on the income gap;For middle-income and low-income provincial and municipal groups,there is not only a phased threshold effect between social security expenditure and income gap,but also the positive regulation effect of social security expenditure is increasing with the improvement of economic development level.Finally,in view of the above conclusions,suggestions are made to improve the income redistribution effect of social security expenditure from the perspectives of expanding the scale of social security expenditure,improving the social security system and coordinating urban and rural development.