Access to Social Insurance in Urban China: A Comparative Study of Rural-Urban and Urban-Urban Migrants in Beijing

Zhiming Cheng, Ingrid Nielsen and Russell Smyth

No 05-13, Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Since 1958 the hukou (household registration) system has assigned Chinese citizens either a rural or urban status. Some studies argue that the rural-to-urban migrants in China who do not have urban hukou are not entitled to urban social insurance schemes, due to institutional discrimination, which applies differing treatment to urban and rural hukou (chengxiang fenge). Although rural-urban migrants participate less in the social insurance system than their counterparts with urban hukou, a closer examination of recent policy developments shows that migrants actually do have the legal right to access the system. This implies that discrimination between rural and urban workers has been declining, and distinctions based on household registration status are less able to explain China's current urban transition. This paper provides a new way of examining Chinese migrants' social insurance participation, by adopting a framework that includes both rural-to-urban migrants and urban-to-urban migrants, which are an important, but less studied, migrant group. Among our key findings are that urban migrants are more likely to sign a labour contract than rural migrants; urban migrants have higher participation rates in social insurance than rural migrants; having a labour contract has a greater impact than hukou status in determining whether Beijing's floating population accesses social insurance; and urban migrants who have signed a labour contract have higher participation rates in social insurance than either rural migrants or urban migrants without a labour contract.

Keywords: rural-to-urban migrants; urban-to-urban migrants; social insurance; labour contract (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias, nep-mig, nep-tra and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/eco/research/paper ... hengnielsensmyth.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/eco/research/papers/2013/0513accesssocialchengnielsensmyth.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.monash.edu/business/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.monash.edu/business)

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:mos:moswps:2013-05

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.e ... esearch/publications

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simon Angus ().