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Abstract Since China’s market reforms in 1978, together with the rapid development of the economy, the household income and the wealth gap in China have also gradually expanded. According to the data, the Gini coefficient of household income in 1988 was 0.382, but it rose to 0.474 in 2007 and 0.451 in 2013 and reached 0.465 in 2016, each of which is at a relatively high level. Meanwhile, the Gini coefficient of household wealth also increased from 0.538 in 2002 to 0.739 in 2010. At the same time, the public and the academic community had a major controversy on this issue. In response, the central government has repeatedly proposed to improve the redistribution mechanism of the social security system and narrow the gap of income distribution in China. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to evaluate the latest achievements and developmental trends in the studies of the social security redistributive effect, and to summarize and carefully review the theoretical and empirical analysis of the redistributive role of social security.Generally speaking, this field mainly studies the redistributive effect of social security based on three perspectives. Firstly, it analyzes the current redistributive effect of social security system’s contributions and benefits based on the residents’ annual income. The social security funds come mainly from the contributions of employees, employers and financial support. The contributions are generally paid as a certain proportion of an individual’s initial income and are redistributed according to the degree of risks. The groups with lower initial income can receive higher benefits, so social security will change the current income distribution of households at a certain point and has a certain redistributive effect. The second is to analyze the long-term redistributive effect of lifetime net benefits of social security on the basis of individual lifetime income. The pension system will redistribute the lifetime income of the same generation in different life cycles or of different generations, that is, the redistributive effects within and between generations. The third is the redistribution effect of the pension wealth available to social security in the future on the distribution of household wealth. The hidden wealth from the social security system can have an impact on the distribution of household wealth. Compared with the pension income, pension wealth can reflect the benefits from a pension system more comprehensively. The vested pension rights have an impact on the distribution of household wealth. The existing literature on the redistributive effect of China’s social security system still has some limitations. Future research needs to be done in normative studies, empirical studies and policy effects to assess the redistributive effect, and to provide the policy basis for narrowing the income inequality in China.
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