آیا بیمه فرزندان در مقابل درآمد بازنشستگی کم والدین خوب است ؟ تجزیه و تحلیل با استفاده از داده های نظر سنجی از شهری کشورچین

As population aging becomes more pronounced in the developing world, the uneven implementation of social safety nets raises important questions as to how well traditional family-based mechanisms insure elderly incomes when pension systems fail. Using a unique dataset from a recent household survey conducted in urban China, we find evidence that private transfers respond to low household income of retired workers when income falls below the poverty line. This finding is consistent with an altruistic motive for transfers at low levels of household income. At the same time, however, the transfer response to elderly pre-transfer income is not sufficient to fully cover shortfalls that arise with severe pension arrears and low retirement income.

In many countries across the developing world, the introduction of public social insurance and pension systems is growing in importance as rapid demographic transition and urbanization place traditional extended family support mechanisms under increasing pressure. New pension systems are difficult to implement smoothly, however, in a regulatory environment in which employers and employees alike find it advantageous to opt out of “mandatory” participation. Non-compliance in new pension systems may be exacerbated if future support is viewed as uncertain when benefits evaporate with firm bankruptcy or with the inability of the government to collect mandated contributions from current employers. In such a setting, transfers from non-resident adult children may provide insurance against low retirement income. Urban China presents an interesting environment in which to study the willingness of adult children to support parents facing failure of public or enterprise-based pension systems. First, while pension coverage was quite high prior to reform of the state sector, reform of loss-making enterprises has occurred simultaneously with piecemeal development of a de facto pay-as-you-go (PAYG) system in which current workers support current retirees. A significant share of retirees face pension arrears with bankruptcy of former employers, and for these elderly problems with arrears or non-payment can be expected to last into the indefinite future. Second, fertility controls and increases in life expectancy have accelerated the pace of demographic change in China. Given the expected increases in the elder share of China's population, it is generally acknowledged that the current PAYG system is not sustainable (World Bank, 1997, Whiteford, 2001 and Murton, 2002), and there is considerable uncertainty as to how well traditional family-based informal mechanisms of support for the elderly can be expected to perform if the PAYG system should fail. In this paper we use data from urban China to examine the responsiveness of family transfers to low levels of income per capita in retiree households. Where studies of private transfers are typically concerned that expanded public transfers may “crowd out” private transfers and weaken the distributive impact of new public safety nets, we are motivated to look into the public–private relationship from a somewhat different angle: we want to determine the extent to which private transfers respond to failure of China's city-based pension schemes, and whether altruistically motivated private transfers insure retirees against low income in old age. We find evidence that family transfers to households with elderly residents respond to pre-transfer income, but even at low levels of pre-transfer income, private net transfers into the household are not crowded out with increasing retirement income, suggesting that retirees are far from fully insured against pension system failure. Results from our least restrictive model show that at income levels below half the average urban poverty line, net transfers into households increase by 0.20 to 0.26 yuan per capita for each one yuan reduction in income. Responsiveness falls as income increases so that transfers increase by only 0.10 to 0.16 yuan for a 1 yuan decline in the neighborhood of the poverty line, and fall further to 0.06 to 0.08 by pre-transfer income equal to twice the poverty line. A more restrictive fully parametric estimate suggests that, at cutoffs well below the poverty line, transfers into the household increase by 0.52 to 0.68 yuan per capita for each one yuan reduction, but that above this low cutoff responsiveness to income is close to zero. For current retirees, transfers far from fully insure households with elderly against low retirement income. The literature on intra-family transfers has focused primarily on efforts to distinguish altruistic and exchange motives for transfers (Barro, 1974, Becker, 1974 and Cox, 1987). Much of the empirical research in the US has suggested that inter-generational inter-vivos transfers are compensatory (e.g., Cox and Rank, 1992 and McGarry, 1999) rather than based on altruistic motives. It is important to remember, however, that in the US, the social security safety net provides substantial insurance against poverty in old age, and thus it is not as surprising to find an emphasis in the US on the flow of resources from older to younger generations. In this paper, we follow an approach developed by Cox, Hansen, and Jimenez (2004) that allows for both altruistic and exchange motives to be present in the transfer decision, with potential differences in the strength of each motive at different levels of pre-transfer household income. We first estimate responsiveness of transfers using the parametric threshold model introduced by Cox et al. (2004), and then show results using a semiparametric partial linear model (Yatchew, 1998 and Yatchew, 2003), which imposes less structure on the relationship between net transfers and pre-transfer income. The semi-parametric model suggests a smoother transition from a dominant altruistic motive to exchange based motives for transfers than found using the parametric threshold model. While understanding the role of private transfers in China is of crucial importance for gauging the impact of pension system reform on the well-being of China's elderly, intra-family transfers in China have received very little attention in the literature. Benjamin, Brandt, and Rozelle (2000) present results suggesting that traditional values of “filial piety” cannot be relied upon to stimulate support of elderly in rural China. White (1998), Shang (1999), Chow (2000), and Saunders, Shang, Zhang, and Sun (2003) provide descriptive discussions of old age support, but do not present any analyses of the significance of intra-family transfers for old-age support in urban China. Our analyses benefit from availability of a unique data source that includes information on all resident and non-resident children of the household, and information about the health status of household members. Detailed knowledge of the family transfer network allows us to control for factors missing from many data sources such as the number of adult children and their average education and age, regardless of whether or not they currently reside in the household. Household composition and the decision to live with an adult child may be confounded with the decision of the child to provide support, and indeed, co-residence may reflect transfers to either the older or younger generation or an exchange across generations. When we examine this possibility, we find that co-residence is only systematically related to pension receipts at high levels of pension income per retiree, suggesting that, after conditioning on other elderly characteristics, co-residence reflects a net transfer to adult children in households with high income elderly. In the next section, we provide background information on demographic and institutional changes that have affected levels of old-age support in urban China. In Section 3 we discuss the China Urban Labor Survey (CULS) dataset and its relative strengths for our analyses. Section 4 introduces the theoretical background and empirical approaches used to study transfer behavior. Results of our analyses are presented in Section 5, and we discuss policy implications in a concluding section.

In this paper, we address the question of how households with elderly cope when enterprise-based or local public pension systems fail to provide sufficient income. We find that private transfers to retirees are a widespread phenomenon in urban China, and that transfers are responsive to income levels when the recipient is poor. Although average per capita transfers-in to households only accounts for 4.4% of the average per capita income of the elderly population, transfers to the poorer elderly are much higher. For those whose income level is at or below half the poverty line, every one yuan reduction of pre-transfer income increases the net per capita transfer by 20 to 26 cents, but by the time pre-transfer income approaches the poverty line, a one yuan reduction in income only leads to an increase in net transfers of 10 to 16 cents. While altruistically motivated transfers offer some insurance, they do not come close to covering the shortfalls that may arise with lack of pension income or severe pension arrears. Second, existence of partial insurance suggests that improving the public pension system will not crowd out private transfers even at very low levels of income. Elder households experiencing shortfalls or non-payment of pensions must rely on savings or sale of liquid assets in addition to transfers if they are to maintain a standard of living above the poverty line. The lifetime savings of current elderly (the transitional generation) are often lower than their younger counterparts, however, because much of their working life occurred prior to reform when incomes were held artificially low and most “saving” was in the form of retained profits of state owned enterprises. Thus, there should be considerable concern about the well-being of transitional cohorts who receive some support through transfers, but will have engaged in less private saving over their working lives than future generations of elderly. Our findings have important policy implications. With regard to using the extended family as a substitute for the formal public pension scheme, we confirm that the extended family contributes in important ways to provision of support for the elderly. Policy may be used to further encourage familial support for elderly through use of tax concessions to children who support their parents through transfers or co-residence. In our sample, the amount transferred to parents is not large and hence may not be able to fully substitute for the public pension scheme, yet this support flows to elderly in need without any government encouragement. As an alternative to crowding out private transfers, it would be useful to design policy that encourages children to meet their filial obligations. By encouraging transfers among extended families, policy could decrease inequality within families, but this will do nothing to limit growth of inequality across families. While more affluent families may transfer more resources to retired elderly under this policy, levels of intra-family income transfer will differ across families. If new policies are to be designed to encourage intra-family transfers, complementary policies should be developed to assist the less fortunate among the elderly who have few family members available to provide assistance, or those with less affluent children.