CIID has established a good platform for academic communications and conducted a wide range of academic cooperation with well-known research organizations and universities in US, UK, Japan, German, Canada, and so on.

The researchers in CIID have taken part in various international research projects, such as the Poverty Research Network for Chinese Young Scholars coordinated with Canadian IDRC/CIGI; the project of Rural-Urban Migration in China, jointly executed with the Australian National University and Institute for the Study of Labor in German(IZA); the project of dynamic evaluations on income distribution in China, cooperated with the University of Western Ontario in Canada, the University of Nottingham and Hitotsubashi University in Japan. Now, the Chinese income distribution project has attracted experts and scholars in nearly 10 countries to participate in research. Most researchers in CIID have the experience of cooperate research with foreign scholars or study abroad.