Abstract: In the context of the high-quality social security development, the basic pension scheme for urban and rural residents is faced with such major problems as lower security levels,undecided benefits determination, inadequate regular adjustment mechanisms, etc.. Taking Jiangsu Province as an example, this paper measures the lower and the upper limits of the reasonable insurance level for theurban-rural pension system. The calculation shows that the lower limit of the reasonable insurance level for 2016-2020 is between 611.71 yuan/month and 771.00 yuan/month, and the upper limit is between 880.34 yuan/month and 1239.37 yuan/month. Therefore, the lower and upper limits of the reasonable replacement rate are determined at 40.73% and 60.97%, respectively. After comparing with the actual value, it is found that the lower limit of the reasonable insurance level far exceeds the lower limit of the actual insurance level. After the strong intervention of the compensation standard raising measures, it is estimated that the higher value of the insurance level may exceed the upper limit of the reasonable insurance level. To this end, specific improvement plans are proposed from the two main aspects: improving the payment level to a reasonable range and establishing a basic pension index adjustment mechanism. It is suggested, based on different payment years, to set a lower limit of 2704~4656 yuan/year and an upper limit of 4441~7504 yuan/year for the higher reasonable payment range and a lower limit of 542~2142 yuan/year and an upper limit of 2279~7504 yuan/year for the lower reasonable payment range. It is recommended to jointly determine the adjustment range of basic pension index benefits with 60% of the annual CPI and 100% of the per capita disposable income growth rate of rural residents.

Key words: basic pension scheme for urban and rural residents, reasonable insurance level, reasonable contribution range, indexation treatment adjustment mechanism