| Since its establishment in 1880s in Germany, modern social insurance has existed in the world for more than 100 years. For a host of economic, social and institutional factors, social insurance has emerged as a very important issue in many developed and developing countries since the 1980s. Because of the accelerating aging problem, the pension reform has been the core of social insurance reform. Privatization, pioneered by Chile, is a fundamentally new model arose in this era, and it has made great achievements gaining worldwide attention and acknowledgement. The People's Republic of China (PRC), the largest developing country with a large population of nearly 1.3 billion and a vast territory in countryside, is also experiencing such problems as aging population and financial crisis in its social insurance, especially in pension system. How to pave the way for reforming China's social insurance system that roots from cultural and historical traditions, has been a difficult and controversial issue for both policymakers and researchers.This thesis takes social insurance privatization as its subject. Drawing a framework from a wide field of academic literature in economics, sociology, anthropology and elsewhere, this thesis introduces the status of social insurance in western countries and the privatization practices. It sets up a theoretical framework for analyzing social insurance privatization in three different levels: institutional, economics and technical. The study also makes some introduction on different practices of social insurance privatization in Chile, Argentina and U.S.A. Finally, an important part of this research is put in discussing the social insurance reform in China.Institutional analysis is placed in great position in this research. Specifically, three key aspects of institution analysis are brought out as follows.First, the research provides an institutional analysis of the historical development of social insurance. It is considered that this is an important aspect of analysis, which can provide a useful context for understanding current problems in western countries, while scholars and policymakers often neglect it. It is pointed out that the existing explanations of social insurance origination and development in industrialized countries tend to over-emphasize economic pressures and under-evaluate important institutional factors such as traditions of family protection, culture and social psychology. The institutional framework of social insurance adopted in this thesis notes that the Christianity culture and the family structure in western countries underlies the origination, development, and current crisis of social insurance. Second, the institutional basis for social insurance privatization is examined in detail. It is recognized that economic problems such as low economic growth rate and high unemployment and inflation rate are the reasons that incurred the recent social insurance crisis and its reform to a certain degree. However, such institutional roots as individualism, liberalism and the legality tradition in western countries, are the reasons that impelled the social insurance crisis and its privatization.Third, based on an analysis of institutional factors, the study discussed some institutional aspects of China's social insurance, taking pension system as an example. Compared with the social structure in western society, the concept of the Family is at the core of traditional Chinese social structure and culture---a tradition that deeply rooted in ethics and social psychology. Over the past 2000 years, the old has been put in great position and the family has provided an important form of social security for the Chinese people. The study contends that in reforming our current social insurance, policymakers should take into account the family's function.This dissertation is organized in introduction and four chapters. The introduction introduces briefly some basic definition for research and the intention of subject selection and the relation betwe... |
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