China's Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) soon will issue a document aimed at urging provincial governments to dispense old-age allowances on a monthly basis and establish an even system of distributions throughout the country, China Economic Weekly reports.

Currently, many regions do not follow the standards designed by Ministry of Civil Affairs to roll out unified regulations to guarantee monthly allowances for residents 80 years of age or older.

It is said that only seven provinces have established a unified allowance system for the elderly, six of which have extended the monthly allowances. These include the municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin and the provinces of Heilongjiang and Yunnan and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, according to Wang Zhengyao, Director of the Social Welfare and Charity Promotion Department under the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

As many as 21 cities in provinces that lack a unified system have set up their own systems to distribute old-age allowances, Wang said.

Some developing regions such as Ningxia and Yunnan have been able to extend the compensation in a unified way, while many developed costal regions have not followed the requirement. When local governments in some areas distribute old-age allowances on a yearly basis, they find that seniors over the age of 80 have already passed away.

The ministry hopes that the document summarizing the experiences in some regions such as Beijing where old-age allowances have already been unified, will help promote the establishment of the system nationwide.

Wang said the announcement was expected to affect the developed regions and called on them to pay more attention to their elderly population. He also pointed out that the idea of turning the old-age allowances into subsistence allowances in some regions needed to be changed, the report said.