Can New Rural Social Pension Improve The Welfare Of Rural Elderly?

According to the international definition of aging,China has entered an aging society for more than 20 years.In recent years,with the accelerated progress of urbanization and rising life expectancy,the aging in rural areas has become increasingly severe.Moreover,General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized in many grass-roots inspections that solving the "Agriculture,Rural areas and Farmers"should be the core task of our Party.With the full implementation of the strategy of rural revitalization,agricultural production and rural infrastructure have been accelerated to realize modernization.But farmers' problems have become more acute as the traditional family pension system has collapsed amid falling rural birth rates,shrinking family sizes and widespread migration of workers from rural to urban areas.In addition,General Secretary Xi pointed out in the report of the Nineteenth National Congress that the main social contradictions have changed,which shows that today,with the remarkable improvement of the social and economic level,a better life has become an urgent need for people's lives,and the subjective welfare level has become a new index for evaluating social development and progress.Based on the above background,as the core component of China's rural social security system,the central government plans to basically achieve full coverage of the NRSP by 2020,which has entered the countdown stage.In this regard,the evaluation of the economic and subjective welfare effects of the NRSP has important reference for exploring whether the NRSP can improve the welfare of the elderly in rural areas,improving and deepening the reform and development of the rural social old-age security system in Chinaas soon as possible.Based on the Welfare Economics,the Life Cycle theory and the Time Allocation Theory,this paper first constructs the leisure-consumption utility function.According to the changes of pension income,this paper makes a theoretical analysis of the micro-individual utility from the two dimensions of leisure time and consumption.Secondly,based on the panel data of CHARLS from 2011 to 2015,this paper identifies the causal relationship between the new rural social security system and the subjective well-being(SWB)of the rural elderly by using the fuzzy RD model and RD-DID model based on different samples,and carries out policy heterogeneity analysis.Finally,in order to verify the theoretical mechanism of the utility maximization function constructed in this paper,we use the economic indicators of labor supply and consumption as intermediary variables,and use the intermediary effect model to analyze the realistic impact mechanism of the new rural pension on the SWB of the elderly in rural areas.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,based on the sample of the insured group,this paper uses the fuzzy RD model to regression and finds that the SWB of the rural elderly is significantly improved by receiving the NRSP;Secondly,based on the mixed sample of the insured group and the uninsured group,the RD-DID model is used to estimate and verify.It is also found that the pension can effectively reduce the working time of the elderly and significantly promote their consumption,and the empirical results are robust to both methods.In conclusion,the NRSP can effectively improve the welfare level of the elderly in rural areas.In addition,policy heterogeneity analysis found that pensions had no significant impact on the welfare of vulnerable groups,such as female elderly,widowed elderly and sick elderly.Thirdly,we use the intermediary utility model to analyze the impact mechanism of the NRSP on the SWB of the elderly,and find that although the new rural security pension can effectively reduce the labor intensity of the elderly and increase their consumption,the main channel affecting the subjective utility of the elderly is only related to labor intensity,not to increase consumption.The innovation of this paper is as follows:first,the construction of individual utility function based on consumption and leisure,as a strong theoretical basis for policy impact path analysis;Second,non-equilibrium panel data from three rounds of micro-survey,fuzzy breakpoint regression and double difference method were used to identify the causal relationship between the new rural insurance system and the subjective welfare of the elderly rural labor force,which expanded the research perspective of policy performance evaluation.Thirdly,the relative importance of each influence channel is empirically tested by using the intermediary effect method,and the indirect influence of the new rural insurance policy on the subjective utility of the rural elderly is supplemented in detail.Finally,according to the empirical research and analysis results of this paper,and combined with the theoretical model,the paper puts forward targeted policy recommendations for the NRSP.