Parental Care and Married Women's Labor Supply in Urban China

Abstract

The aging of the population and the dramatic increase in women's labor force participation have made eldercare and women's labor market outcomes a subject of considerable policy importance not just in industrialized countries but also in transition and developing countries. This study examines the impact of parental care on married women's labor supply in urban China using the China Health and Nutrition Survey for the period 1993–2006. The estimates show that Chinese women confront competing demands for care, not only among elderly parents but also between older parents and their own young children. Moreover, the estimates unveil striking differences in labor market outcomes between caring for parents and caring for parents-in-law: caring for parents does not affect the caregiver's employment status and work hours, whereas caring for parents-in-law has a statistically significant, sizable, negative effect on the caregiver's probability of employment and hours of paid work.

KEYWORDS:

• Eldercare
• women's labor supply
• patrilineal norms
• China

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful for the comments and suggestions of the guest editors, style editor, three anonymous referees, and participants in the workshop for the special issue of Feminist Economics on “Unpaid Work, Time Use, and Public Policy” at American University. We also thank the Heinrich Böll Foundation Beijing Office for its financial support for the project “Care for Children and Elders and Its Impact on Women in China” and the Ford Foundation for its support for the Economic Research and Training Program for young Chinese women economists.

Notes

¹ See Patrick Hennessy (1996) and Stephane Jacobzone (1999) for an overview of policy responses to the growing care needs of frail elderly people in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

² In this contribution, we consider only married women with male partners due to the data limitation. We confine our analysis to the urban sector because the labor market and social security system are distinctively different between the urban and the rural sectors in China.

³ Defining the aged dependency ratio as persons age 60 or older divided by persons between age 15 and 59, Dudley L. Poston, Jr., and Chengrong Charles Duan (2000) project that China's aged dependency ratio will increase from 15.7 percent in 1999 to 26.1 percent in 2020 and 58.6 percent in 2050. In comparison, according to this paper, the aged dependency ratio of the United States was 26.6 percent in 1999 and is projected to be 46.3 percent in 2050.

⁴ According to China's Second National Survey on Disability in 2006, 44.2 million disabled people are over 60 years old, which is 23.65 million more than the figure in 1987 based on the First National Survey on Disability, and they account for 75.5 percent of the increased disabled population (Office of the Second China National Sample Survey on Disability 2007: 11).

⁵ The recent surge of interest in the economics of aging has sparked a growing literature on old age security and eldercare in China. However, the majority of past research efforts have been restricted to exploring the implications of economic reforms and development for the well-being of eldercare receivers, paying little attention to how care burdens have affected women with frail parents in China. A selective list of studies on the economic transition and well-being of elderly people in China includes Yean-Ju Lee and Zhenyu Xiao (1998), Alun E. Joseph and David Philips (1999), Dwayne Benjamin, Loren Brandt, and Scott Rozelle (2000), and Ge Lin (2002).

⁶ By definition, “patrilineality” refers to a system that pertains to, or organizes kinship with and descent through the father or the male line (John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner 1989: 348). In this paper, the term “patrilineal familial care” is used to describe the social norm that married women are expected to care for parents-in-law in exchange for their husbands' approval and support. In a patrilineal system where sons are entitled to inherit property, sons and their wives (not daughters) are obligated to look after their parents. While China's Constitution gives sons and daughters equal rights to inherit family property, the law has not been effectively enforced, and hence, strong pro-son bias exists in practice, even in the cities. For instance, in the early 1980s, the Chinese government allowed the youth who had been sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and later retuned to the cities to replace their parents in the workforce in order to reduce urban unemployment. Most parents (both fathers and mothers) who retired from the labor force in response to this policy passed the employment opportunity to their sons, not daughters. Hence, while being weakened, patrilineal norms continue to exert influence on the pattern of informal care for the elderly.

⁷ The stipulation of family responsibility for the elderly of the Constitution and the Marriage Law is still in effect.

⁸ The authors calculated the statistics. The Chinese Aged Population Survey was conducted by the China Research Center on Aging in 2006. The survey covers 19,947 respondents, with 10,016 in urban areas and 9,931 in rural areas.

⁹ For instance, the 2006 Chinese Aged Population Survey shows that about 57 and 38 percent of the disabled elderly received care from daughter and daughters-in-law, respectively; the respective percentages for sons and sons-in-law were 40 and 27 percent (see Table 1; China Research Center on Aging 2006). These figures are derived based on the responses of elderly care recipients. Given the gendered norms and expectations for caregiving, the extent of eldercare provided by daughters and daughters-in-law is likely to be understated, while the opposite is true for sons and sons-in-law.

¹⁰ See Jianhua He and Yongping Jiang (2008), Liu, Zhang, and Li (2008), and Fenglian Du and Xiao-yuan Dong (2009b)for reference on the impact of welfare reforms on childcare, eldercare and healthcare in China, and Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton (2006) for the welfare reform and its gender implications in Canada.

¹¹ For instance, pension reform in China has spread financial and administrative burdens from state enterprises to a broad swath of employers, workers, national agencies, and local governments (Gang Fan, Maria Rosa Lunati, and David O'Connor 1998). The essence of pension reform is to replace retirement benefits provided by state enterprises with benefits linked to the amount that an individual worker contributes to a retirement account while employed. The idea is to build up individually funded accounts along with social pools that can provide a minimum pension benefit. Payments to both social pools and individual accounts are to derive from employees as wage deductions and from employers.

¹² The limitation of the categorical measure for care is noteworthy. The impact of eldercare on labor supply depends upon the nature and intensity of caregiving. According to the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), the two types of caregivers, on average, spent more or less the same number of hours on eldercare (see Table 4). Regrettably, the survey provides no information on the nature of each type of caregiving.

¹³ The procedure only consists of linear probability regressions for Care and IV estimation of equations (1) and (2) yields consistent but inefficient estimates of the structural parameters (James J. Heckman 1978). To acquire efficient estimates, the multinomial logit regressions are introduced. Ettner (1995) calls estimates of the multinomial logit model “stage-zero” estimates, and estimates of the linear probability model “stage-one” estimates.

¹⁴ The main source of parental care information – the Survey of Ever-Married Women Under Age 52 – is unavailable for 1989 and 1991.

¹⁵ We adjust the standard errors of estimates for heteroscedasticity and also for clustering by cross-sectional units.

¹⁶ The regression results are available upon request to the authors.

¹⁷ Ettner (1995, 1996) and Wolf and Soldo (1994) use parents' health status to measure the parents' demand for caregiving and number of siblings for the availability of other family members to share caregiving responsibilities. Information on the health status of parents is unavailable in the CHNS, and information on siblings is unavailable for the 1993 and 1997 surveys. One limitation of using parents' survival status as IVs for Care is its potential correlation with a woman's labor supply. Arguably, women whose parents are still alive may need to work longer hours to support their parents. To check whether such a correlation exists, we added the four parental survival indicators to the labor force participation and labor supply equations. None of these variables were found to have any significant, appreciable impact on the labor supply variables. This result is not surprising; with patrilineal social norms, it is sons, not daughters, who are expected to provide financial support for older parents.

¹⁸ The CHNS also provides information on the number of hours worked during the week preceding the survey. We choose the measures based on labor supply in a typical week, which better capture long-run accommodations to care responsibilities, as Wolf and Soldo (1994) argue. As a sensitivity check, we estimate the structural effects of caregiving using the number of hours worked in the last week, and the estimates obtained are qualitatively similar to those presented in Tables 5 and 6.

¹⁹ One should read the comparative statistics between caregiving types with caution, since the number of observations is small.

²⁰ Studies of other developing countries show that school-aged children, especially girls, help reduce their mothers' care burdens by taking care of younger siblings (for example, see Rachel Connelly, Deborah S. DeGraff, and Deborah Levison 1996). However, this may not be the case in urban China given the extraordinary attention Chinese parents pay to their children's test performance at each level of school entry examinations.

²¹ Based on the Hausman test, the assumption that caregiving is determined by care needs and availability of care resources and not by employment status seems plausible for the part of urban China under investigation. Reliable paid care services for the disabled elderly are available mainly in large cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangdong. These cities are not covered by the CHNS survey, and these services are also too expensive for a typical family in our sample. The finding that caring for parents-in-law has a significant impact on the caregiver's labor supply while caring for parents has no such effect also casts doubt on the view that women take on more informal care because they are unable to find employment. There is no reason to believe that daughters-in-law have more difficulty finding re-employment than daughters.