Study On The Influence Of New Rural Pension Scheme For The Eldercare In Rural China

Aging population in rural areas has become a severe issue, but family security and collective security fails to effectively help the elderly. In order to release the pressures from China’s rural aging population, China has started the New Rural Pension Scheme(NRPS) since September 2009 in some selected regions, which positively influences the lives of older people. Researches on old age insurance and its pattern have been done by Chinese and oversea researchers. But because the level of economic development and makeup of the cultural background in each country are not the same, the research results are therefore different.In this paper, the concepts related to NRPS, the evolution and development of the old-age insurance are clearly described at the beginning. Then, public transfers and private transfers basic theory, and basic theory of residential way of living are introduced. On the basis of theoretical analysis, we use the latest data of Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey to finish our empirical test. We analyze the influence of NRPS by how much intergenerational financial support the elderly received from their children, and how they choose the living pattern. We estimate the intergenerational support of the elderly affected by the NRPS using OLS, and whether the older people will choose to live with their children by Logistic regression. But,because NRPS do not force people to take part in, participations in the insurance are affected by various factors, traditional regression method may have large deviation.So we adopt an empirical strategy that combines propensity score matching with difference-in-difference approach(PSMDD) to correct the potential selection bias.Moreover, the non-parametric estimation and linear regression have the consistent result.The results show that NRPS has a crowding out effect to the intergenerational support, which increases the possibility of the older people living alone. It means that enrollees were more likely to live independently rather than co-reside with their adult children and the elders who attend NRPS received less transfers from adult children.NRPS has become an important supplement to the traditional eldercare patterns in rural china. The old-age insurance patterns reflects the national productivity, the level of economic development and culture implication, besides, it is directly related to the physical and mental health of the elderly. State-subsidized social provision for the age,like NRPS, has started a new dimension for the rural elderly care, and boosted the development of social elderly care. According to the empirical test, we at last havethree policy suggestions. First, we should try to improve the rural social service system; second, we should increase the family’s actual strength of taking care of the order people; third, we should perfect the NRPS system and enhance the impact of the social old-age care system.