Search results

The need for a universal rural pension system has been heightened by demographic changes in rural China, including the rapid aging of the nation’s rural population and a dramatic decline in fertility. In response to these changes, China’s Government introduced the New Rural Social Pension Program (NRSPP) in 2009, a voluntary and highly subsidized pension scheme. The purpose of this paper is to assess the participation of rural farmers in the NRSPP. Furthermore, the authors examine whether the NRSPP affects the labor supply of the elderly population in China.

This paper uses household-level data from a sample of 2,020 households originating from a survey conducted by the authors in five provinces, 25 counties, and 101 villages in rural China. Using a probit model and conducting correlation analysis, the authors demonstrate the factors affecting the participation and the impact of NRSPP on labor supply of the rural elderly.

The results show there are several factors that are correlated with participation, such as specific policy variant in force in the respective household's province, the size of the pension payout from government, the age of sample individuals, and the value of household durable assets. Specifically, different characteristics of NRSPP policy implementation increase participation in China’s social pension program. The results suggest that the introduction of the NRSPP has not affected the labor supply of the rural elderly, in general, although it has reduced participation for the elderly who were in poor health.

Several previous studies have covered the NRSPP. However, all previous studies were based on case studies or just focused on a small region, and for this reason the results cannot reflect the populations and heterogeneity of rural areas. Therefore, a data set with a large sample size is used in this paper to provide a new perspective to fully understand the participation of NRSPP and its impacts on rural households. This paper will make an update contribution to the literature in the area of pension programs in China.

This paper seeks to understand the evolution of financial intermediation in the course of China's economic transition.

The research is based on a unique data set collected by the authors and other collaborators from a 1998 survey of financial institutions, enterprises, and government officials in southern China.

Based on an empirical investigation of rural financial reforms, it is argued that China's two‐decade long financial reform was a gradual process that accommodates reforms in other sectors and responds to changing policy goals and the economic and institutional environment in which financial institutions operate. Although using standard measures of financial system performance may cast doubt on the effectiveness of China's rural banking system, when one understands the different roles that it has been asked to play, it can be argued that it has not operated so poorly.

In conclusion, it is found that China's rural economic environment is still changing. If the system continues to change in the future, responding to pressures in the economy, further financial reforms will almost certainly emerge in the coming years.

These findings, although primarily from the 1980s and 1990s, are still helpful in understanding the reform process that is currently ongoing.

This paper will help readers make sense of agricultural financial reforms and will allow for more discourse over what has been accomplished and what still is needed.

This is the first manuscript to comprehensively put China's rural financial reforms into the context of modern economic analysis, explaining why China's government proceeded as they did and why the reforms have unfolded in such a stop and start manner.

Many public health systems have struggled with the dual questions of (1) why the uptake rate of maternal health services is low among some subpopulations; and (2) how to raise it. The objective of this study is to assess the uptake rate of a new set of maternal health services in poor rural areas of China.

The analysis is based on the survey responses of women’s representatives and village cadres from almost 1000 villages in June 2012 as part of a wide-scale public health survey in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan provinces in the western part of China.

We find that the uptake rate of maternal health services (including in-hospital delivery, antenatal care visits and post-partum care visits) in poor rural areas of western China are far below average in China, and that the rates vary across provinces and ethnic groups. Our analyses demonstrate that distance, income, ethnicity and availability appear to be systematically correlated with low uptake rates of all maternal health services. Demand-side factors seem to be by far the most important sources of the differences between subpopulations. We also find that there is potential for creating a Conditional Cash Transfer program to improve the usage of maternal health services.

We believe that our results will contribute positively to the exploration of answers to the dual questions that many public health systems have struggled with (1) why the uptake rate of maternal health services is low among some subpopulations; and (2) how to raise it.

The paper aims to discuss whether the younger generation of China's rural labor force is prepared, in terms of education level or labor quality, for the future labor markets under China's industrial upgrading.

Using nationally representative survey data, the paper gives detailed discussions on the young rural laborers' education attainments, and their off‐farm employment status including job patterns, working hours, and hourly wage rates. The relationship between education and employment status is analyzed and tested. Through these discussions, an employment challenge is revealed, and some policy implications are made.

This paper finds that China's young rural laborers are generally poorly educated and mainly unskilled. They work long hours and are low paid. While they lack the labor quality that will be required to meet the industrial upgrading, an employment challenge may face them in the near future. This paper also finds a strong link between education levels and employment status for the young labor force, which implies the possible effect of policies such as improving rural education.

Based on a solid foundation of a national rural household survey, this paper updates the understanding of the education and employment situations of the young rural labor force in contemporary China. The concern about the employment challenges raised in the paper is related to the future of China's rural labor transition and the whole economy.

This paper aims to explain why the quality of infrastructure projects in rural China differs from village to village and how project quality is correlated with project design attributes and governance factors.

Using primary data collected by the authors on three types of infrastructure projects in villages across China, they created measures of project quality for each village. They then used both descriptive and multivariate approaches to examine how quality varies from village to village and factors correlated with quality.

Between‐project within‐village quality differences are small and project design has little explanatory power. Between‐village variations are large. There are strong correlations between the ways villages govern themselves and project quality. The authors conclude that it is difficult to make good projects work in communities that lack good governance.

Disaggregated data on the quality of infrastructure (and its determinants) were collected by the authors to allow for variation in the type of infrastructure projects (roads, irrigation, and drinking water) and variation in village governance, making it possible to identify and contrast the effects of project design and village governance factors on project quality. As its chief contribution, this work identifies potential ways to improve the quality of infrastructure projects in rural development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether an in-service life teacher training program can improve boarding students’ health, behavior, and academic performance.

The authors conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial to measure the effect of life teacher training on student health, behavior, and academic performance among 839 boarding students in ten central primary boarding schools in Shaanxi. And the authors also tried to identify why or why not life teacher training works. Both descriptive and multivariate analysis are used in this paper.

The authors find significant improvements in health and behavior. Specifically, compared to boarding students in control schools, 15 percent fewer students in treatment schools reported feeling cold while sleeping at night. The results also showed that student tardiness and misbehaviors after class declined significantly by 18 and 78 percent, respectively. However, the in-service life teacher training program had no measurable impact on boarding students’ BMI-for-age Z-score, number of misbehaviors in class, and academic performance. The analysis suggests that improved communication between life teachers and students might be one mechanism behind these results.

This is the first empirical work which explored how to improve the welfare of boarding students via their life teachers. Because of the sudden increase in boarding students in rural China, it is almost certain that school personnel lack experience in managing boarding students. As such, one promising approach to improving student outcomes might be in-service training for life teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to describe trends in irrigation investment in China’s rural villages in the 2000s, identify the types of villages in which investment occurred and examine whether this investment had an impact on agricultural land.

This study makes use of longitudinal survey data from a nearly nationally representative sample of 101 villages spread across five provinces. The outcome variables are cultivated area, sown area and effectively irrigated area, and ordinary least squares regression and fixed effects models are used for the analysis.

In spite of sustained investments into irrigation from 1998 to 2011, there has been almost no impact on agricultural land. Cultivated area and sown area have fallen across all five sample provinces while effectively irrigated area remains largely unchanged. The authors also show that there is no relationship between investment into irrigation and agricultural land. Irrigation facilities also have the lowest rate of rural resident satisfaction of any of the major public services provided.

More research is needed to understand the impact of irrigation investment on crop yields and water savings.

Policymakers may need to rethink the current pattern of investment into irrigation.

This is the first study to quantitatively model the impact of investment into irrigation at the village level all over China.

The purpose of this study is trying to document and examine the impacts of pesticide use on farmers' health. Different from previous studies, the paper is not only going to focus on the visible effect, but also the invisible effect. At the same time, the paper is going to divided the pesticides into highly toxic and low toxic pesticides and estimate their different impacts on farmers' health, respectively.

This paper uses regression techniques based on a farm household survey gathered by the authors in Zhejiang provinces. In addition to a sit‐down interview with 100 households, the authors gave a comprehensive physical examination and a blood examination to farmers who applied pesticides most frequently in each household.

This paper indicates that farmers who spray more pesticides are more likely to have headache, nausea and skin problems. Beside these visible effects, this paper also finds that exposure to pesticides has significant invisible impact on farmers' neurological, liver and kidney systems.

This, it is believed, is one of the first comprehensive studies to give comprehensive physical examination and blood examination to farmers who applied pesticides most frequently in each household.

Since 1999, China has undergone reform of its healthcare system. City‐based social health insurance (SHI) is the primary form of current health insurance, supplemented by various commercial health insurance programs. The rural new cooperative medical system (NCMS) was introduced in 1993 and extended to cover the whole of rural China in 2003.

The paper developed a theoretical model for consumer demand of medical services and health insurance based on an expected utility framework with a two‐stage decision under uncertainty. The model is then applied to current health insurance systems in China for urban citizens and rural residents separately. Least square and logistic regressions are employed.

The major results are that although the factors driving the decisions on health insurance participation are basically the same for rural and urban citizens, the participation levels are quite different. The major difference is that urban SHI has higher coverage and urban citizens have higher income, resulting in a much larger urban medical expenditure.

The empirical analysis reveals that health insurance programs have played an important role in the healthcare expenditure for urban residents, while the NCMS has not made a significant impact towards increasing the ability of rural residents to seek more medical services, based on data at 2004.

This is the first paper employing a health production theory on China's new urban and rural healthcare programs.