The evolution of China’s social policies

Richard Herd ()

Economic Change and Restructuring, 2013, vol. 46, issue 1, 109-141

Abstract: The movement of the Chinese economy towards a market-based system brought about a profound change in the nature of the social protection system in China and in the relative incomes of different groups in society. The collectively-provided health care systems failed to adapt to the new economic system, pension provision in urban ceased to be provided for all workers and rewards in the labour market became linked to the market-value of a skills. The result was a significant increase in inequality driven, especially by differences between urban and rural incomes. Since the middle of the last decade, though, inequality has stopped rising and shows signs of declining as increased labour mobility has tended to raise incomes in rural areas. At the same time, a range of new social policies have been introduced. While the level of spending on these policies remains low, they offer a framework for future expansion. There are still some areas where only limited progress has been made, notably concerning the access of migrants to public services in urban areas. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Keywords: Ageing; Retirement; Household registration; China; Pension projections; Hukou; Income inequality; Spatial inequality; Health care; Labour mobility; Migration; Pension system; Poverty; Replacement ratios; Retirement age; Portability; Social assistance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10644-012-9138-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:ecopln:v:46:y:2013:i:1:p:109-141

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/10644/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10644-012-9138-z

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Change and Restructuring is currently edited by George Hondroyiannis

More articles in Economic Change and Restructuring from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().