Income redistribution seen as urgent task

Experts call for greater wealth transfer from SOEs to social welfare

China should look beyond short-term stimulus and decisively redistribute incomes to expand consumption, especially by transferring more State-owned wealth to the social welfare system, leading economists and policy researchers said.

Now is the time to act, they said, with the latest consumption stimuli, such as the trade-in programs, creating a window to plan for long-term reforms to sustain momentum after the immediate stimulus effects wear off, paving the way for the much-anticipated consumption-driven economic model.

"Policymakers have begun prioritizing bolstering domestic consumption, but a long-term structural reform framework is essential beyond short-term measures," said Chen Yuyu, director of the Peking University Economic Policy Research Institute and a professor at PKU's Guanghua School of Management.