An Evaluation of China’s Basic Pension Insurance Benefit Adjustment Policy to Ensure Sustainability, Guarantee, and Fairness

Pension benefit adjustment is an effective measure to ensure the basic living standards of retirees, improve people’s livelihood, and maintain social harmony and stability. This study uses the entropy weight TOPSIS method to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of pension benefit adjustment policy in 31 provinces in China from three dimensions of sustainability, guarantee, and fairness. The Dagum Gini coefficient is used to analyze the pension benefit adjustment effects in China’s four major regions and the sources of differences among the three subsystems. Finally, the dynamic evolution of the effect of pension benefit adjustment was analyzed using kernel density estimation. The following conclusions were achieved: (1) Sustainability indicator scores are declining, while guarantee and fairness indicator scores are both on the rise, indicating that provinces are placing greater emphasis on fairness and ensuring the basic living standards of retirees in pension benefit adjustments; (2) The overall variation in the impact of pension benefit adjustments is decreasing, with regional disparities being the primary source of overall variance; (3) Pension benefits in the eastern region have increased significantly, while there are significant variations among provinces in the central and western regions. The adjustment effect for pension benefits in the northeastern region is poor and requires further enhancement. These findings provide valuable policy basis for achieving the sustainability, guarantee, and fairness of pension funds.