| China' s population is aging rapidly.In 2020,China's elderly aged 60 and over reached 264 million,accounting for 18.7%of the total population.Among them,190 million elderlies were aged 65 and older,accounting for 13.5%of the total population.After the middle of the 21st century,the proportion of the elderly aged 65 and over will account for almost 30%-50%.The aging of the population will bring severe challenges to the intergenerational wellbeing and long-term care of the elderly.Due to the decline of the physiological functioning of the elderly,their labor participation rate and income will gradually decrease or even vanish.For another,their basic medical and long-term care needs will increase significantly.If family transfer payments and public transfer payments cannot support them with sufficient basic income,they are very likely to suffer from poverty.This dissertation will focus on the impact and effort of individuals,families and the government on the income sources,income gaps and income levels of the urban and rural elderly.Due to China's long-term dual economic structure,various public services,social security and labor employment benefits have been only rely in urban household registration,contributing to the significant differentials on income structure,social security and pension benefits between the urban and rural elderly.With the declining number of children and shrinking size of the family,intergenerational relationships and the traditional family-based support model in rural areas will experience huge challenges.The process of urbanization has promoted a massive out-migration of young rural laborers to more developed urban places,contributing to higher level and speed of aging in rural areas than in urban areas.It will be difficult for family members to provide daily-care for the elderly in rural areas.As China speeded up the reform of social security system in recent years,it has been upgraded from focusing on only urban residents to covering the entire population.Efforts have been made to integrate the urban and rural basic pension,basic medical insurance and social assistance programs.However,the gaps of incomes and pension benefits between urban and rural elderly are still quite wide.This paper takes the data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study(CHARLS)to study the income of elderly aged 60 and over in urban and rural areas,focusing on the income levels,sources and determinants between urban and rural elderly.Primarily,according to the different sources of elderly's income,the total income is divided into personal income,family income and government transfer income.The paper analyzes the level and sources of the elderly income,and its changes and features as well.The paper also compares the income of the elderly from urban and rural,regional and other dimensions.The results show that during the study period,the income level of the elderly differed greatly in the dimensions of urban and rural areas,regions,age groups,and gender.Among them,the income gap between urban and rural areas is the largest,and the income structure difference is also very significant.Secondly,the paper analyzes the degree of income inequality of the elderly in urban and rural areas and the contribution of various factors to inequality.This paper uses various inequality indexes to measure the income gap of all elderly,urban and rural elderly,and decomposes the income gap in two dimensions.The paper uses the Thiel index to measure the income gaps between the urban and rural groups and within the groups.The paper further decomposes the Gini coefficient by source of incomes.The results showed that the income gap within the urban group experienced a trend of expanding while turn to shrink then.The inequality degree within the rural group tended to decline.The degree of inequality between urban and rural groups also declined significantly,while the overall gap tended to be narrowed.Among various sources of incomes,social insurance net transfers made the largest overall contribution to the Gini coefficient of total income.The research conducts quantitative analyses of the factors affecting the income of the elderly.This paper constructs a linear regression econometric model to examine the factors affecting individual income and the trend of changes in the incomes of the overall urban and rural elderly,urban elderly,and rural elderly.The model includes individual-related factors such as personal natural endowment and human capital accumulation,family-related factors,and factors related to social support policies and other factors.The analysis finds that the factors affecting the incomes of urban and rural elderly differ significantly.The income of the urban elderly is more affected by the social security system,and that of the rural elderly are more affected by the familial transfers.Following that,the paper analyzes the role of social security system in reducing the elderly income and promote social equity in the recent years.The analyses find that social security played a positive role in promoting the income of rural elderly,narrowing the urban-rural income gap,and in maintaining social equity and harmony.However,the urban-rural divide in social security system still exists,as the urban-rural disparity in the incomes derived from the social security benefits remained substantial,even surpassing the overall income gap between urban and rural residents.In addition,the paper makes an comparative study on the elderly income and the social security system in the United States,Japan,and major European developed countries.Although different countries have different conditions,they all face the financial pressure from the aging population and the national basic pension.Many system reforms have been made to provide stable and sustainable income security for the elderly,including the promotion of pension system reforms and fostering the sustainability of pension funds;building a multi-pillar pension system to meet the needs of different income groups;attaching more attention to fairness of the basic pension through its function in the income redistribution to ensure the basic income of low-income group.Efforts were also made to improve the minimum income maintenance programs,and long-term care for the needed elderly as well to provide underpinning protection for the poor and sick elderly.In response,the paper puts forward relevant policy recommendations based on the above analyses,including implementing active aging,increasing the labor participation rate of the elderly,continuing to encourage the supporting role of the family,and improving the fairness and efficiency of public finance and social security transfer payments;increasing human capital investment for the elderly in the future;boosting China's population fertility rate and slowing down the process of declining birth-rate and aging population. |
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