Impact Of Social Insurance On The Vulnerability Of Rural Low-Income Households

For a long time,social protection takes reducing vulnerability for the main policy objective,and is committed to improving the ability of low-income families to deal with risks,to help them achieve the basic rights and meet the basic needs.In theory,the rural social insurance system should be an important method of reducing vulnerability for low-income families:the New Rural Social Pension Insurance(NSPI)against the risk of pension,while the New Rural Cooperative Medical System(NCMS)resist the risk of disease,and they both can avoid low-income groups into poverty.In practice,though social protection has been widely covered,the NSPI and the NCMS have achieved certain results on poverty reduction,narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor and promoting the equalization of basic public services,it's lack of empirical research on reducing vulnerability and enhance the ability of risk prevention.Even if the research has demonstrated that the NSPI plays a certain role on reducing vulnerability for rural households,but it didn't consider the system of access restrictions(minimum payment level)on the ability to resist the influence of risks especially for weak low-income households.This kind of analysis actually neglected in the payment stage of low-income households.Similarly,the NCMS influences on the vulnerability of low-income households is differ from the ability to pay,so another focus of this paper is concerned with the change of catastrophic health expenditure for low-income households'vulnerability.This paper employs both the average-value model and the variance model of consumption to estimate the vulnerability of low-income households in rural areas with panel data from China Family Panel Studies(CFPS).Then it will compare the change of consumption of poverty and vulnerability,to analyze the impact of the NSPI and the NCMS to low-income households' vulnerability.The research mainly includes three aspects:First of all,the paper uses the forward-looking VEP(Vulnerability as Expected Poverty)to measure the vulnerability of rural low-income households,then to summarize the survival characteristics of rural low-income households and compare the differences of their vulnerability and consumption;Secondly,in the base period as the standard,we estimate the effect of the NSPI on the premise of distinction between payment stage and beneficiary stage,and explore its relative contribution to the vulnerability of low-income families in different stages;In addition,the paper compares the characteristics of rural low-income families'medical consumption,and analyzes the impact of the NCMS on the vulnerability of low-income households.Correspondingly,the results can be summarized as the following three points:Firstly,the proportion of vulnerable households is higher than the proportion of consumption poverty,and two types of families cross exist in the sample of rural low-income families.Differed from the traditional method using income and consumption to estimate poverty,vulnerability index not only reflects the ability to cope with risks in different families,but also identifies the edge of poor families so that it is conducive to precise poverty;Secondly,the paper evaluates the effect of the NSPI by categorizing those low-income households into two groups:households who are still in the payment stage while with no beneficiary,and households who benefit from the NSPI.The results show that although the vulnerability of households who benefit from the NSPI reduced significantly around 14-21%,solid evidences demonstrated that the NSPI contributes 15-18%of the increase of vulnerability of households that are still in the payment stage with no beneficiary,and even more serious with the increasing numbers of person participating the NSPI in a household.In addition,both per capita net income and saving play crucial roles in reducing vulnerability of low-income household either at payment stage or at beneficiary stage,which implies the effectiveness of development oriented anti-poverty measures.Therefore,the paper argues that the government,in the short run,should subsidizes the low-income households at the payment stage to induce them participating the NSPI,and eventually to reduce the vulnerability that they are facing;and the government,in the long run,should raise the amount that the elderly can draw from the NSPI as well as to raise the minimum payment gradually for establishing an effective and efficient social protection regime.At last,the influence of the NCMS on the vulnerability of rural low-income families has discrepancy because of their capacity to pay.On the whole,only for the low standard of poverty,the vulnerabilities of low-income families have decreased significantly,but to the families who having catastrophic health expenditure,the NCMS can reduce vulnerability of families with the increasing of its reimbursement.Therefore,it's still necessary to expand the scope of reimbursement for diseases and improve the reimbursement proportion of NCMS to mitigate the impact of disease risk on rural low-income groups.