1. Introduction
According to the United Nations accepted standard, a region with 10% proportion of people over 60 years old or a 7% proportion of people over 65 years old will be considered as an aging society. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, by the end of 2019, the number of people aged 60 and above reached 254 million, accounting for 18.1% of the total population, while the number of people aged 65 and above had reached 176 million, accounting for 12.6% of the total population, which has far exceeded the international standard. Therefore, China has entered a highly ageing society, leading to the fact that China’s basic pension is confronted with acute sustainable development issues at the current stage. As the financial pressure of social pension increases, it is of great practical significance to discuss how to stabilize the pension expenditure under the new normal of the economy. In order to maintain a stable pension expenditure, drawing on the mature experience from foreign countries, China has begun to implement the personal income tax deferred preferential policy in the fields of enterprise annuity and occupational pension since 1 January 2014. According to the policy, taxes are deferred on the part of individual income that is contributed to the enterprise annuity and are paid when pensions are withdrawn after retirement, hence relieving the current tax burden. As for individual commercial pension insurance, a trial of personal income tax deferral was launched in 2015, which means that tax incentives have been fully covered in the three major fields in China’s pension insurance system, namely basic pension insurance, enterprise annuity and individual commercial insurance.
Basic pension insurance, enterprise annuity, and individual commercial insurance are known as the three pillars of the pension insurance system in China. The first pillar is the basic social pension insurance, which accounts for 80.74% among the three pillars in China. At present, there is a large funding gap, and its contributions are far less than the distributions, which makes the basic pension insurance system in need of state financial subsidies. The second one is enterprise complement pension insurance, accounting for only 6.43%, the lowest part among the three pillars, with very few enterprises participating, a low coverage rate and a small scale. The third pillar is the individual commercial pension insurance, which currently accounts for 12.83%. Compared with the structure of 30%, 30%, and 40% in countries with more mature pension insurance systems, the development of the three pillars in China is extremely uneven, and there is still substantial room for optimization in terms of the balanced proportion. There are many problems in China’s pension system that need to be solved urgently. We still need to learn from international experience and carry out reform in terms of structure and management [
1].
In order to solve the problem that China’s basic pension is facing, namely severe sustainable development and the increasing financial pressure of a social pension, China promulgated the “Notice on the Pilot Program of Personal Income Tax Deferred Commercial Pension Insurance “ in 2018, which clarified the Exempting Exempting Taxing (EET) model for the personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance piloted in China-tax exempted during the contribution phase (Exempting), tax exempted during the investment phase of commercial pension accounts (Exempting), and deferred tax levied during the pension withdrawal phase (Taxing).
China’s economic model is different from that of the developed countries in Europe and the United States. Its policymaking is based on the mature experience of Western countries, such as using the mainstream EET model, and setting differentiated requirements such as payment limits based on actual national conditions. The development of tax deferred commercial pension t insurance in China is a typical case of absorbing and summarizing the mature insurance experience of Europe and the United States, which also provides a broader idea and mode for other developing countries that have not yet popularized the insurance.
Under the EET model, participating in personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance reduced the current tax burden of the insured, and taxes are paid when pensions are withdrawn from the account after retirement. Under this process, factors like tax reductions, commercial pension withdrawals, and government tax incentives will jointly affect personal pension wealth. Not only that, factors, such as market interest rates, wage growth rates, commercial pension investment returns, mortality rates, and pension adjustment policies will also affect the changes in personal pension wealth. Based on this, in order to calculate the expected actuarial present value of changes in the personal pension wealth more reasonably, this article introduces the mortality distribution function, surrender value, and tax reduction into the model assuming that economic and institutional factors are random variables, and constructs an expected actuarial model for the impact of tax-deferred commercial pension insurance on changes in personal pension wealth.
The originality of this paper is as follows. First, in the study of the commercial pension insurance under the EET model, the actuarial model with the surrender value of death is constructed by referring to the system of the surrender value of death of the employees of the basic pension insurance and combining with the practical practice of the commercial pension insurance. Secondly, on the basis of introducing the death rate into the model, this paper constructs the expected actuarial present value model and tax saving actuarial present value model of the impact of personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance on personal pension wealth, and analyzes the impact of personal income tax deferred policies on personal pensions wealth and tax savings. This provides a way to analyze the impact of individual tax deferral policies. The insured can choose whether to participate in the personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance according to their actual measurement in real life. This paper provides specific quantitative indicators for the insured to help them choose.
More and more attention has been paid to the pension problem in China. Since 2000, the research results on this issue have increased significantly and become an upward trend [
2]. Longevity risk and pension pressure are the two core factors of pension problem. From 1950 to 2016, life expectancy in the United States increased by 11 years, and more than half of the increase was related to the survival rate of people aged 65 and above [
3]. In this paper, the survival rate is added to the actuarial model, and life expectancy is combined with pension wealth to calculate. Although there is no final conclusion on whether there is an increase in the life limit of human beings, some scholars think that when the life expectancy exceeds 105 years old, the mortality rate will basically remain unchanged [
4]. Therefore, this paper sets the mortality rate according to the actual situation in China
Taxation is closely associated with the economic life of households. Tax expenditure is a representative method to measure the cost of implementing preferential tax policies. According to the concept of tax expenditure, the economic cost of preferential tax policies is the reduced government fiscal revenue [
5]. During the evaluation of personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance policies, the cost of preferential tax policies can also be measured through tax expenditure. In Europe and America, enterprise annuity is an important form of tax incentives affecting the economy. For instance, tax-deferred enterprise annuity accounts can affect households’ saving behaviors, which in turn affect their wealth [
6]. For enterprises, preferential tax policies can have an effect on matching payment of enterprises, and can also reduce the pressure of cash flow and optimize debt ratio by affecting the proportion of self-purchase of fixed assets [
7]. From a macro perspective, changes of employers in the annuity system can also affect other forms of pension and also macroeconomic development. Considering the context of China, the security level for employees has declined to a large extent after the implementation of the personal income tax deferred program for enterprises annuities, and the degree of decline varies a lot among groups with different genders, different income levels, and different contribution ratios [
8].
The mechanism of taxation on people’s consumption and saving behavior is mainly to adjust people’s short-sighted behavior. Short-sightedness refers to a lack the foresight to save for old age. It is precisely because taxation can change people’s consumption and saving behaviors that taxation has a corrective effect on the pension system, but there exist certain disputes about the direction of this corrective effect. Traditionally, it is believed that because short-sightedness reduces savings when young, tax adjustments can promote savings and increase the motivation to save for old age, but in terms of the welfare costs, studies have confirmed that the more short-sighted people are, the lower the optimal social security tax shall be [
9]. From the perspective of participants of pension insurance, their contributions have a crowding-out effect on current consumption, leading to a decline in the current disposable income of employees [
10]. Therefore, the personal income tax deferred policy reduces the crowding-out effect of pension insurance contributions on disposable income, which in turn affects personal pension wealth and changes the allocation of personal pension assets in various periods of life.
Since countries with developed insurance industries have been implementing personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance or a long time, their analysis covers more extensive fields and much deeper contents than China’s. In the United States, according to Section 401, Paragraph k of the “Internal Revenue Code” (IRC), for a defined contribution (DC) pension, there is a preferential policy of deferring tax payment when purchasing DC pension insurance, so it is also called a 401(k) plan. After the implementation of this plan, scholars have two sharply different views on how the program will affect personal savings. Some analysis demonstrates that the plan cannot increase personal savings, but some scholars have found the opposite, suggesting that the 401(k) plan increases personal savings. The reason for these reverse conclusions is that researchers disagree about whether tax-preferential pension contributions should be classified as expenditure or as potential saving assets. In addition to the 401(k) plan in the United States, other countries also have similar plans, such as deferred retirement savings accounts. However, it is suggested that in the long run the introduction of tax-deferred accounts will not increase national wealth while improving social welfare, and it may distort the current income tax system. Under the tax deferral policy, the most important factors affecting pension account assets are mainly individual contribution rate and investment returns [
11]. Increasing the contribution rate and postponing the retirement age have a significant positive effect for women on their replacement rate [
12]. In domestic analysis, scholars put more emphasis on pension wealth, an indicator gaining high social concerns. Among them, the net return of pension is an indicator to measure pension wealth, which refers to the difference between the present value of the pension benefits withdrawn by the insured during the entire life cycle and the present value of their contributions. An important factor affecting the net return of the insured person’s pension is their age [
13]. After the implementation of the delayed retirement policy in China, pension wealth will inevitably change. The establishment of an actuarial model for pension funds proves that pension wealth is affected by the combination of different parameters, such as the insured age, gender, wage growth rate, etc. [
14]. The addition of enterprise annuity can increase the pension wealth with the increase of retirement age [
15]. And regardless of whether it is a 401(k) plan or a domestic tax deferral policy, scholars currently unanimously recognize that the implementation of preferential tax policies in the field of pension insurance and annuities can have an impact on pension wealth and personal savings behavior though their conclusions may be inconsistent.
The impact of tax incentives on pension is not only limited to personal savings and wealth, but also has an incentive effect on pension plan. In the United States, tax incentives have a positive incentive effect on individual participation in pension plan. Similarly, in Australia, different tax patterns also have an impact on consumption, savings, and social welfare. Moreover, studies have shown that the implementation of the tax deferral policy also has a positive impact on the management of commercial pension insurance funds. The personal income tax deferred model under the EET pattern reduces the proportion of insurance companies’ investment in risky assets [
16], and therefore the implementation of personal income tax deferral can affect the pension wealth of the insured, stimulate consumers’ desire to purchase commercial pension insurance, and reduce the insurer’s investment risk [
17]. However, the effect of this kind of stimulus is very limited. The current policy’s stimulus for purchasing tax-deferred commercial insurance is limited to some specific groups of people. For more comprehensive promotion, it is necessary to increase the level of tax incentives [
18,
19]. Some scholars build an actuarial balance model based on the replacement rate, and believe that an appropriate increase in the deduction limit can effectively increase the replacement rate of commercial pension insurance [
20], while some other scholars suggest that, in order to maintain the scope of the benefit group under the old tax system, the personal income tax deferred pension insurance should minimize the tax rate at the post-retirement stage, and demonstrate that this will not lead to an increase in fiscal costs through actuarial models [
21].
To sum up, personal pension wealth is bound to change after the implementation of personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance. In this paper, the mortality distribution is introduced into the actuarial model for pension, and tax incentive policies are added to build an actuarial present value model for the impact of personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance on personal pension wealth, and the impact of personal income tax deferred policies on personal pension wealth is analyzed. According to the current tax deferral policy, the authors analyze the tax relief brought by participating in the tax deferred commercial pension insurance, quantify the degree of tax incentives via constructing indicators such as gross tax savings and net tax savings rate, and calculate the individual benefits of participating in the insurance in terms of taxation.
The outline of the paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, we construct relevant actuarial models, including the actuarial present value model of personal pension wealth and the pension net replacement rate model. In
Section 3, a numerical simulation is carried out on the relevant models, and the influence of relevant parameters on the actuarial quantity is analyzed. Finally, conclusions and policy recommendations are given in
Section 4.
2. Construction of Related Actuarial Model
This paper studies the effect of participating in tax deferred plans on changes in the present value of personal pension wealth. According to the current situation of China’s social basic pension insurance and the newly launched personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance system in 2018, it is assumed that participation in this insurance will not affect personal consumption and savings, that is, consumption and savings remain unchanged. Therefore, compared with those who are not insured, changes in the present value of personal pension wealth of the insured will be reflected in the following five aspects:
- (1)
The actuarial present value of commercial pension insurance contributions prior to retirement.
- (2)
The actuarial present value of the surrender value of the commercial pension account in the case of an unexpected death at the contribution stage.
- (3)
The actuarial present value of the tax deferred commercial pension withdrawals at the post-retirement stage.
- (4)
The actuarial present value of the surrender value of the commercial pension account in the case of death at the withdrawal stage.
- (5)
The actuarial present value of tax credits brought by the tax deferred commercial pension insurance at the contribution and withdrawal stage.
This paper will construct an actuarial present value model to study the impact of personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance on the change of the present value of personal pension wealth (PPW) from the five aspects mentioned above. In order to calculate the expected actuarial present value of PPW more reasonably, the authors introduce the mortality distribution into the model, assuming that economic and institutional factors are random variables, and therefore the actuarial present value model of change in PPW is expressed as:
where
denotes for the expectation operator,
represents the expected actuarial present value of commercial pension withdrawals during retirement,
stands for the expected actuarial present value of the surrender value of the commercial pension account at the contribution stage,
represents the expected actuarial present value of commercial pension insurance contributions,
represents the expected actuarial present value of the surrender value of the commercial pension account at the withdrawal stage, and
represents the expected actuarial present value of individual tax credits caused by the tax deferred commercial pension insurance.
According to the actual situation, it is assumed that commercial pension insurance premium is paid annually, and its contribution happens at the beginning of the year, so does the withdrawal. The model also set that the insured person first participates in the insurance at the age of
(at time 0), pays for the pension premium
also at the age of
(at time 0), and plans to retire at the age of
(time
). According to the China Statistical Yearbook 2018, in China the average life expectancy of men in 2015 was 73.64 years, and that of women was 79.34 years. Therefore, it is assumed that the insured person chooses to withdraw commercial pensions within a fixed period of 15 years, that is, receive commercial pensions within
years after retirement, as shown in
Figure 1.
2.1. The Actuarial Present Value Model for PPW
According to the setting of the model for changes in the present value of PPW in formula (1), , , , , and need to be modeled separately.
2.1.1. The Expected Actuarial Present Value of Commercial Pension Withdrawals during Retirement
According to Article 22 of the Individual Income Tax Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2018, provided the insured person’s personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance premium and individual income tax both are paid at the beginning of each year, the premium for year would be
where
represents the contribution ratio of personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance;
indicates the annual salary of year
and
,
stands for the growth rate of income; and 12,000 (yuan) represents the maximum annual insurance premiums stipulated by the current policy (see
Figure 1). In order to calculate the expected actuarial present value of commercial pension withdrawals during retirement, it should be set clear that
is the total of commercial pension withdrawal (
) for each year, and in turn
is determined by the value of the commercial pension accounts at the moment of retirement. Therefore, the authors set the equation for the final wealth (
) of the commercial pension accounts at
years old (time
) to be
where
represents the rate of investment returns of the commercial insurance accounts in year
, and in addition, it’s assumed that
. Therefore, the equation for the commercial pension withdrawal for each year would be
where
denotes for the pension withdrawal per 10,000 yuan of the commercial pension accounts,
stands for the proportion of exempted tax (25%) at pension withdrawal stage, and
represents the individual income tax rate at pension withdrawal stage.
From this, it can be concluded that the expected actuarial present value of total commercial pension withdrawals at time 0 would be
where
represents the survival rate of the insured person at the age of
living to the age of
, and
represents the risk-free interest rate at year
.
2.1.2. The Expected Actuarial Present Value of the Surrender Value of the Personal Income Tax Deferred Commercial Pension Account at Contribution Stage
It’s assumed that represents a certain integral point within the contribution stage. According to the policy requirements, if the insured person dies within , the value of commercial pension accounts shall be refunded, and the corresponding individual income tax that should be paid shall be deducted based on the tax deferral policy. Therefore, the authors should calculate the individual income tax that should be paid additionally in the case of surrender.
Let
be the additional individual income tax payment during surrender in the case that the insured person dies within
;
represents the contribution ratio of social basic pension insurance;
represents the initial income payment base;
represents the income payment base for year
; and
represents the individual income tax exemption. To simplify the equation,
and
represent the corresponding quick individual income tax deduction in the case that the premium is unpaid in year
and that the premium is paid in year
, respectively, that is the difference between the tax calculated at the full progressive tax rate and at the excess progressive tax rate;
and
represent the individual income tax rate in the case that the premium is unpaid in year
, and that the premium is paid in year
, respectively, where
represents the scale of individual income tax rate, which is determined by the taxable annual salary (
). So, the additionally paid individual income tax
would be
where
.
The expected actuarial present value of the part that should be refunded from the individual commercial pension insurance account at time 0 should be
2.1.3. The Expected Actuarial Present Value of the Personal Income Tax Deferred Commercial Pension Insurance Contributions
It’s assumed that once participating in the insurance, the insured person won’t surrender unless death happens, and insurance premium will be paid till retirement. The expected actuarial present value of the personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance contributions at time 0 would be
2.1.4. The Expected Actuarial Present Value of the Commercial Pension Surrender Value at the Withdrawal Stage
It’s assumed that
represents a certain integral point
during the commercial pension withdrawal stage after retirement. If the insured person dies within
, according to the policy requirements, the remained value of the commercial pension accounts should be refunded. Therefore, the actuarial present value of the remained value of the commercial pension accounts at the withdrawal stage should be defined as
2.1.5. The Actuarial Present Value of the Tax Credits Brought by the Personal Income Tax Deferred Commercial Pension Insurance
According to the requirements of China’s current personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance EET model, commercial pension insurance can have an effect on the individual income tax of in 3 ways: the commercial pension insurance contributions
, the investment returns from the commercial pension insurance accounts
and the withdrawal from the commercial pension after retirement
. Therefore, the actuarial present value of tax credits can be shown as
The expected actuarial present value of the tax credits at time 0 can be divided into the following 3 parts. The first part takes place at the commercial pension contribution stage. According to the Article 22 of Individual Income Tax Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2018, when purchasing a commercial pension insurance product that meets the requirements at this stage, the premium can be deducted within a certain standard prior to individual income tax. According to the latest “Decision on Amending the Individual Income Tax Law of the People’s Republic of China” issued in 2018, the tax saving model for the contribution stage of individual income tax is
The second part is at the stage of fund investment of commercial pension insurance accounts. According to the relevant content of the “Notice”, personal income tax is temporarily not levied on the investment income of individual fund accounts at this stage, so the tax saving model at this stage would be
where
stands for investment income tax rate.
The third part is at the stage of personal commercial pension insurance withdrawals after retirement. Also, according to the relevant provisions of the “Notice”, personal income tax is paid at 75% of pension income, and its actuarial present value model is
The three stages of contributions, investment, and withdrawals shown in formulas (11)–(13) together constitute the tax-saving process of personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance. Under their joint effects, the expected actuarial present value model for changes in personal income tax brought by the personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance at time 0 can be expressed as
In summary, according to the definition of the present value of personal income tax deferred commercial pension wealth in this paper, for participants who are insured at the age of
and plan to retire at the age of
,
the actuarial present value of changes in the present value of their PPW at time 0 can be expressed as
2.2. Pension Net Replacement Rate Model
The previous section constructed the expected actuarial present value model for the impact of tax-deferred commercial pension insurance on the present value of PPW. In order to better reflect the impact of the insurance on the living standard of the insured, the authors introduce the net replacement rate (NRR) to measure the life-guarantee level of the tax-deferred commercial pension insurance. It’s expressed as
Net replacement rate (NRR) = annual withdrawals from the personal income tax deferred commercial pension/personal total annual salary in the year before retirement
4. Conclusions and Policy Recommendations
Commercial pension insurance is an important supplement to the basic social pension insurance, and is of great significance to alleviating the financial pressure of social pensions and maintaining its sustainable development. First of all, as a feature of personal income tax deferral, the result of personal income tax deduction has a very good effect. The calculation results of tax saving amount in
Table 1 and
Table 2 show that individuals, regardless of being men or women, as long as they participate in the insurance, can get different degrees of personal income tax deductions, but there are some differences in the amount of tax savings. Men stand to gain more than women, which has a certain relationship with women’s earlier retirement and higher pension amount. From the inverted U-shaped curve in
Figure 2 and
Figure 3, it can be seen that both men and women have the optimal age for tax saving. The age for male is 23 and that for female is 25. In terms of pension,
Figure 6,
Figure 7 and
Figure 8 show that the younger the initial age of the insured is, the greater the positive impact on personal pension wealth is. Under the same initial age of the insured for different genders,
Figure 7 and
Figure 9 show that there is a certain difference in the increase of the actuarial present value of personal pension wealth between men and women. However, participation in personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance can increase personal pension wealth. Finally, as far as the pension replacement rate is concerned,
Figure 13 gives a good explanation: personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance can make the low-income people increase the pension replacement rate to a large extent, and ensure their quality of life after retirement, while the high-income people can improve their overall wealth level through the insurance.
In order to better balance and develop personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance, the following measures are recommended. First, according to the principle of actuarial balance, the insured households shall be differentiated as double-income families and single-income families, and tax relief on different families shall conducted separately. More preferential policies shall be given to the insured persons who are the only child or comply with China’s ‘two-child’ policy, which will increase the enthusiasm of all income groups to participate in the insurance. Second, personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance may be combined with enterprise tax deferred annuities, expanding the scope and level of insurance participation, and increasing the penetration rate of commercial pension insurance, so that it can truly assist the basic social pension insurance. Third, the investment scope of the personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance funds shall be appropriately relaxed, increasing its rate of return, and also the amount of commercial pensions, so as to attract more employees to participate in the insurance.
The limitation of this paper is that the annual premium payment method is adopted, and only the fixed interest rate and wage growth rate are used to simulate the model, and there is no empirical test. Our next research will focus on the accuracy of model variables and empirical test. Tax deferred pension insurance is an essential insurance type in developed countries. The development of personal income tax deferred commercial pension insurance in China not only draws lessons from Western mature experience, but also provides ideas and models for countries that want to but have not yet carried out the same type of insurance.