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ABSTRACT
Old-age pension, a fundamental part of the Chinese social security system, is perceived by the Chinese government as the last support for rural-to-urban migrant workers upon retreating from the labor market. Using survey data collected by the authors, this paper examines a host of factors which influence migrant workers’ participation in the old-age scheme. The result shows that individual characteristics, employment status, attitudes toward old-age support and perception of the old-age pension system significantly differentiate two groups of migrant workers between those that have participated in and their counterparts who have not participated in the old-age pension schemes. Among a number of factors, age, educational attainment, holding labor contract, etc. are found to be significant factors influencing migrants’ behavior participating (or not participating) the available age-pension schemes. Policy implications for how to improve the rate of participation in existing old-age pension schemes among migrant workers are drawn from the findings.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. “Migrant workers” (Waichu Nongminggong) in China should be distinguished from “farmer workers” (Nongminggong) as the former are those working outside their home town or township, while the latter ones refer to all off-farm workers, both working inside and outside their home town or township. So there is disparity in citing statistics regarding volume of migrant workers in different references (e.g. Xu et al. Citation2011)
2. is the 2010 Population Census data for all interprovincial migrants from Sichuan, but those from rural areas makes up 92.89%.