应对社会老龄化对收入不平等的影响：以马来西亚为例（英）

Counteracting the Impact of Societal Agingon Income Inequality A Case Study of Malaysia Gerton RongenMatthew DornanPhilip O’KeefePeter Lanjouw Social Development Global DepartmentApril 2026 A verified reproducibility package for this paper isavailable athttp://reproducibility.worldbank.org,clickherefor direct access. Policy Research Working Paper11356 Abstract This paper analyzes the effect of societal aging on incomeinequality in Malaysia, to date and in the coming decades.The study starts from the hypothesis that, all things equal,aging exerts upward pressure on inequality (Deaton andPaxson (1994, 1995)). Drawing on nationally representa-tive household survey data over the past two decades, thestudy finds evidence in support of this hypothesis in Malay-sia. This picture becomes even sharper when projectinginequality levels for the years when Malaysia is forecast toreach aged (2045) and super-aged (2056) status. Estimatesshow that between 2022 and 2056, overall inequality ofindividual incomes could rise by as much as 13 percent dueto aging. The analysis then demonstrates that expansion ofa social pension system would attenuate this projected risein inequality. The paper also undertakes counterfactual exer-cises simulating the expansion of an old age social pension with various design variants. The variants considered wouldexpand existing social transfers for older people. Given thepublic revenue and spending patterns in Malaysia, someof these design options are potentially manageable from afiscal perspective. The analysis suggests that, relative to theobserved situation in 2022, wider coverage of social pen-sions could have resulted in lower inequality in householdper capita income among older individuals (by 12–26 per-cent), thereby lowering overall inequality (by 4-9 percent).This inequality-reducing effect of social pensions becomeseven more marked when projecting estimates of inequal-ity for 2045 and 2056. Moreover, the findings show thatexpanded pensions would have resulted in a lower head-count poverty rate in 2022 by 1.3–4.2 percentage pointsamong the 60+ population, and by 0.5–1.9 points amongthe overall population. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Counteracting the Impact of Societal Aging onIncome Inequality: A Case Study of Malaysia Gerton Rongen,a*Matthew Dornan,bPhilip O’Keefe,cand Peter Lanjouwa JEL codes: D31, H55, J11, J26, O15 Keywords: population aging, income inequality, poverty, pensions, decomposition, Malaysia Acknowledgments: the authors would like to thank Chris Elbers, Elena Glinskaya, Maria AnaLugo, John Piggott, Achim Schmillen, Matthew Wai-Poi and Ya Shin Wan for their valuablecomments. * Corresponding author:a.g.m.j.rongen@vu.nlaVrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and DevelopmentbWorld BankcCentre for Population Ageing Research (CEPAR), University of New South Wales 1.Introduction In societies across the world, societal aging and economic inequalities are themes ofconcern to citizens and policy makers alike. Importantly, a connection exists between these twophenomena, which this paper will investigate for the case of Malaysia. High inequality is seen bymany as undesirable; in Malaysia, a recent survey found that 63 percent of respondents sawreducing inequality as an urgent task for the government (World Bank, 2024a). Moreover, highinequality often goes hand-in-hand with low economic mobility and makes it harder to reducepoverty if economic growth is slow (Ferreira et al., 2014; World Bank, 2016a). Evidence also existsshowing that high inequality harms income growth for the poor in a society, whilebenefittingtheincomes of the rich (van der Weide & Milanovic, 2018). In related analysis, Deaton and Paxson (1995) have demonstrated that an aging societymay mechanically lead to increasing inequality. This process goes as follows:first,we start fromthe premise that consumption and income inequality within a birth cohort increase as the cohortages, due to the cumulative effects of random shocks to incomeas predicted by theories ofintertemporal choice, such as the permanent income hypothesis (Deaton & Paxson, 1994).1Analternative theoretical mechanism is that structural factors such as education, health andprivilege have a compounding effect over time, alsowith the result that the dispersion of incom