Cultural and Ethnic Differences in the Transitions from Work to 'Retirement' of Rural Elders in China’s Minority Regions

Rachel Connelly and Margaret Maurer-Fazio

No 9343, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper considers the work to "retirement" transitions of the rural elders in China who reside in seven regions with substantial minority populations. The data employed, those of the China Household Ethnicity Survey, are ideal for examining the effect of cultural differences on this key lifecycle event, the reduction of market-oriented work with age. Membership in particular ethnic minority groups is used to proxy the potential differences in the culture of aging and caregiving. We find that beyond education, the strongest predictors of labor force participation for China's rural elders are age, disability, widowhood, and ethnic minority status. The effects of ethnic minority group status on labor force participation are robust and the differences in participation among ethnic groups are sometimes large. It is thus misleading, in the analysis of the labor force participation of China's rural elders, to simply dichotomize ethnic minority and majority (Han) group membership. Further careful research is needed to help understand the differences in perceptions of aging among China's rural ethnic minority groups.

Keywords: China Household Ethnicity Survey; aging; elders; labor force participation; retirement; ethnicity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J14 J15 J16 J26 O53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cna, nep-cul, nep-dem, nep-lma and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: B. Gustafsson, R. Hasmath. S. Ding (eds), Ethnicity and Inequality in China, New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2021, 82-109. / published in Chinese, Beijing, 2017, 56-83.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9343.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9343

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().