The Retirement Expectations of Middle-aged Chinese: Differences between Self-employed Workers and Wage and Salary Workers

Abstract

This paper explores the retirement expectation condition of middle-aged workers in China, including non-farm workers, and divides them into self-employed workers and wage and salary workers to find what the difference between their retirement expectations is. The main focus of this study is how retirement expectations differ from different employment types, the self-employed workers (SE) and wage and salary workers (WS), and the reason why there are those differences between the two groups.

Population Aging is an important issue in China especially because of the Family Planning Policy and One-child Policy. It caused economic worries of the so-called sandwich generation who were born at 1980s and 1990s. Many of the sandwich generation (one-child generation) may suffer from both pressure of raising their kids and pressure of supporting their parents. Thus to understand population aging status it is also essential to understand the retirement status of the elder non-farm Chinese workers as well.

The focus of this study is the retirement expectation instead of retirement itself because there are still not many studies on workers expectations and plans of retirement. It provides policy implications for the Chinese government to implement the specific policy of postponing the retirement age according to the characteristics of the retirement expectations between self-employed workers and wage and salary workers. Whats more, anticipating future changes in the labor-market activity and participation of the elderly population in China is also suggested by studies of retirement expectation.

This paper used the CHARLS (China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study) data to analyze the retirement expectations of specifically non-farm self-employed workers and wage and salary workers. As will be discussed below in detail, in this paper the self-employed group makes up about 36% of the sample size in the CHARLS (China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study) data, and it is showed that the average retirement expectation age of the self-employed samples is higher than that of the wage and salary workers.

The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) is a Chinese nationally representative longitudinal survey of persons who were 45 years old or older, including assessments of social, economic, and health circumstances of community-residents. It examines health and economic adjustments to rapid ageing of the population in China. This paper used the national baseline survey for the study which was conducted between June 2011 and March 2012. The limitation of this paper is that its sample size is not very large because of the lack of values of several necessary explanatory variables and control variables, but the regression analysis results in this paper still have reference significance.

There are several sections of this paper. The first section is the introduction. The next section explains the background of population aging, retirement expectation, labor participation, SE and WS groups, and other related literature as well. The third section introduces the CHARLS data and the conceptual framework. The fourth section is the descriptive statistics, regression result analysis and understanding. Finally, the last section presents the conclusions of the study.

이 논문은 중국의 중년층 근로자의 퇴직 기대 조건, 특히 자영업자 (SE) 와 임금 및 급여 근로자 (WS) 간의 차이점과 그 차이점에 초점을 맞추어 퇴직 기대 조건을 분석하였다. 이 논문은 CHARLS (China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study) 자료를 분석하여 자영업 종사자가 성별에 관계없이 임금 및 급여 근로자보다 늦은 연령에 은퇴하는 경향이 있음을 시사한다. 이러한 차이점의 주요 원인은 다음과 같다. 첫째, SE 근로자는 직무 특성과 근로자 특성의 일치성이 더 높다. 따라서 SE 근로자는 WS 근로자보다 더 일하는 것을 더 늦추기를 기대한다. 왜냐하면 SE 근로자의 경우 직업 노력을 바꾸거나 다른 잘 조화된 직업으로 전환하는 것이 더 쉽기 때문이다. 둘째, WS 근로자의 교육 수준은 SE 근로자보다 평균적으로 높고, 퇴직 기대에 대한 교육의 부정적 효과는 WS 근로자에게 더 심각하다. SE 근로자와 비교하여 교육 수준이 높은 WS 근로자는 삶의 질에 더 많은 관심을 기울이고 SE 근로자에게는 중요하지 않은 여가 시간 연장을 추구한다. 셋째, 퇴직 기대에 대한 부의 영향은 WS 근로자에게 보다 중요하다. SE 근로자에게는 미래의 직업이나 직무에 대해 더 많은 불확실성이 있으며 충분히 부를 축적되더라도 퇴직 기대치를 바꾸지 않는다. 이 논문은 중국 정부가 자영업자와 임금 및 급여 근로자 간의 은퇴 기대치의 상대적인 특성에 따라 퇴직 연령 연기 정책을 시행할 때 정책적 함의를 제시한다.