Yaohui Zhao

Cohort Profile: The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS)

The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) is a nationally representative longitudinal survey of persons in China 45 years of age or older and their spouses, including assessments of social, economic, and health circumstances of community-residents. CHARLS examines health and economic adjustments to rapid ageing of the population in China. The national baseline survey for the study was conducted between June 2011 and March 2012 and involved 17 708 respondents. CHARLS respondents are followed every 2 years, using a face-to-face computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI). Physical measurements are made at every 2-year follow-up, and blood sample collection is done once in every two follow-up periods. A pilot survey for CHARLS was conducted in two provinces of China in 2008, on 2685 individuals, who were resurveyed in 2012. To ensure the adoption of best practices and international comparability of results, CHARLS was harmonized with leading international research studies in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) model. Requests for collaborations should be directed to Dr Yaohui Zhao (yhzhao@nsd.edu.cn). All data in CHARLS are maintained at the National School of Development of Peking University and will be accessible to researchers around the world at the study website. The 2008 pilot data for CHARLS are available at: http://charls.ccer.edu.cn/charls/. National baseline data for the study are expected to be released in January 2013.

Labor Migration and Returns to Rural Education in China

This paper provides an answer to the following question: Why do empirical studies find low returns to schooling in rural China, and yet the schooling rates are high? I find that schooling played a significant role in raising the accessibility of urban formal employment to rural people in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the face of the governments restrictive policy on labor migration from rural to urban areas. The large urban-rural income difference provided a strong incentive for senior high school education. The theory also explains the drop in the senior high school attendance in the mid 1980s. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.

Foreign direct investment and relative wages: The case of China

Abstract According to the conventional wisdom, foreign direct investment (FDI) can raise relative wages of skilled labor in a host country by bringing in skill-biased technology. This paper proposes an alternative hypothesis that in an economy characterized by labor market segmentation and high labor mobility costs, FDI could increase relative wages of skilled labor even without bringing in skill-biased technology. Chinese urban household survey data are used to test the hypothesis. We first estimate relative wages in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) by correcting for possible sample selectivity caused by employment choice between SOEs and FIEs. Employment choice is then examined to provide evidence of the costs of labor mobility. The research implies that skill premium in a host country with labor market distortions may increase faster than when skill-biased technology is the only force for skill upgrading.

Earnings Differentials Between State and Non-State Enterprises in Urban China

The present paper estimates earnings differentials between state and non-state sectors for Chinese urban residents in 1996 by taking into account differences in non-wage benefits. Household survey data are used to estimate wage differentials while aggregate statistics are utilised in estimating non-wage benefits. We find that state-sector workers earned significantly more than workers in urban collective and domestic private enterprises in 1996. Unskilled workers in foreign invested enterprises (FIE) earned significantly less than those in the state sector but skilled workers earned more in FIE than in the state sector. These findings shed light on the source of labour immobility that state-owned enterprise had experienced until recently.

Trends in the Gender Earnings Differential in Urban China, 1988-2004

This paper analyzes changes in the gender earnings gap in urban China over the period 1988–2004 using urban household survey data. The mean female/male earnings ratio declined from 86.3% to 76.2%. Mainly responsible for this diverging trend were rapid increases in returns to both observed and unobserved skills, which accentuated the disadvantage associated with womens lower skill levels. The gender gap in observed skills such as education narrowed over the study period, but did not close, and there is evidence that the gap in unobserved skills widened considerably. Increased discrimination may also have served to widen the gender earnings gap. Analyses by earnings percentile and by sub-period show that although the gap widened much more at the lower end of the earnings distribution than at the upper end over the period as a whole, it widened greatly at the upper end in the most recent years (2001–2004).

Depressive symptoms and SES among the mid-aged and elderly in China: Evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study national baseline

We examine the prevalence of depressive symptoms among the mid-aged and elderly in China and examine relationships between depression and current SES factors such as gender, age, education and income (per capita expenditures). In addition, we explore associations of depressive symptoms with measures of early childhood health, recent family deaths and current chronic health conditions. We use data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) national baseline, fielded in 2011/12, which contains the ten question version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale (CES-D) for 17,343 respondents aged 45 and older. We fill a major gap by using the CHARLS data to explore the general patterns of depression and risk factors among the Chinese elderly nationwide, which has never been possible before. We find that depressive symptoms are significantly associated with own education and per capita expenditure, and the associations are robust to the inclusion of highly disaggregated community fixed effects and to the addition of several other risk factors. Factors such as good general health during childhood are negatively associated with later depression. There exist strong gender differences, with females having higher depression scores. Being a recent widow or widower is associated with more depressive symptoms, as is having a series of chronic health problems, notably having moderate or severe pain, disability or problems with measures of physical functioning. Adding the chronic health problems to the specification greatly reduces the SES associations with depressive symptoms, suggesting that part of the pathways behind these associations are through these chronic health factors.

Gender Differences in Cognition Among Older Adults in China

In this paper, the authors model gender differences in cognitive ability in China using a new sample of middle-aged and older Chinese respondents. Modeled after the American Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), the CHARLS Pilot survey respondents are 45 years and older in two quite distinct provinces — Zhejiang a high growth industrialized province on the East Coast, and Gansu, a largely agricultural and poor Province in the West. Their measures of cognition in CHARLS relies on two measures that proxy for different dimensions of adult cognition — episodic memory and intact mental status. They relate both these childhood health measures to adult health and SES outcomes during the adult years. They find large cognitive differences to the detriment of women that were mitigated by large gender differences in education among these generations of Chinese people. These gender differences in cognition are especially concentrated within poorer communities in China with gender difference being more sensitive to community level attributes than to family level attributes, with economic resources. In traditional poor Chinese communities, there are strong economic incentives to favor boys at the expense of girls not only in their education outcomes, but in their nutrition and eventually their adult height. These gender cognitive differences have been steadily decreasing across birth cohorts as the economy of China grew rapidly. Among younger cohorts of young adults in China, there is no longer any gender disparity in cognitive ability.

The Effects of Childhood Health on Adult Health and SES in China

In this article, we model the associations of childhood health on adult health and socioeconomic status outcomes in China using a new sample of middle-aged and older Chinese respondents. Modeled after the American Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), the CHARLS Pilot survey respondents are 45 years and older in two quite distinct provinces—Zhejiang, a high growth industrialized province on the East Coast and Gansu, a largely agricultural and poor province in the West. Childhood health in CHARLS relies on two measures that proxy for different dimensions of health during the childhood years. The first is a retrospective self-evaluation using a standard five-point scale (excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor) of general state of one’s health when one was less than 16 years old. The second is adult height believed to be a good measure of levels of nutrition during early childhood and the prenatal period. We relate both these childhood health measures to adult health and SES outcomes during the adult years. We find strong associations of childhood health on adult health outcomes particularly among Chinese women and strong associations with adult BMI particularly for Chinese men.

Growing old before growing rich: inequality in health service utilization among the mid-aged and elderly in Gansu and Zhejiang Provinces, China

BackgroundChina’s recent growth in income has been unequally distributed, resulting in an unusually rapid retreat from relative income equality, which has impacted negatively on health services access. There exists a significant gap between health care utilization in rural and urban areas and inequality in health care access due to differences in socioeconomic status is increasing. We investigate inequality in service utilization among the mid-aged and elderly, with a special attention of health insurance.MethodsThis paper measures the income-related inequality and horizontal inequity in inpatient and outpatient health care utilization among the mid-aged and elderly in two provinces of China. The data for this study come from the pilot survey of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study in Gansu and Zhejiang. Concentration Index (CI) and its decomposition approach were deployed to reflect inequality degree and explore the source of these inequalities.ResultsThere is a pro-rich inequality in the probability of receiving health service utilization in Gansu (CI outpatient = 0.067; CI inpatient = 0.011) and outpatient for Zhejiang (CI = 0.016), but a pro-poor inequality in inpatient utilization in Zhejiang (CI = −0.090). All the Horizontal Inequity Indices (HI) are positive. Income was the dominant factor in health care utilization for out-patient in Gansu (40.3 percent) and Zhejiang (55.5 percent). The non-need factors’ contribution to inequity in Gansu and Zhejiang outpatient care had the same pattern across the two provinces, with the factors evenly split between pro-rich and pro-poor biases. The insurance schemes were strongly pro-rich, except New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) in Zhejiang.ConclusionsFor the middle-aged and elderly, there is a strong pro-rich inequality of health care utilization in both provinces. Income was the most important factor in outpatient care in both provinces, but access to inpatient care was driven by a mix of income, need and non-need factors that significantly differed across and within the two provinces. These differences were the result of different levels of health care provision, different out-of-pocket expenses for health care and different access to and coverage of health insurance for rural and urban families. To address health care utilization inequality, China will need to reduce the unequal distribution of income and expand the coverage of its health insurance schemes.

The Regulation of Migration in a Transition Economy: China's Hukou System

Unlike most countries, China regulates internal migration. Public benefits, access to good quality housing, schools, health care, and attractive employment opportunities are available only to those who have local registration (Hukou). Coincident with the deepening of economic reforms, Hukou has gradually been relaxed since the 1980s, helping to explain an extraordinary surge of migration within China. In this study of interprovincial Chinese migration, we address two questions. First, what is a sensible way of incorporating Hukou into theoretical and empirical models of internal migration? Second, to what extent has Hukou influenced the scale and structure of migration? We incorporate two alternative measures of Hukou into a modified gravity model – the unregistered migrants: (i) perceived probability of securing Hukou; and (ii) perceived probability of securing employment opportunities available only to those with Hukou. In contrast to previous studies, our model includes a much wider variety of control especially important for the Chinese case. Analyzing the relationship between Hukou and migration using census data for 1985-90, 1995-2000 and 2000-05, we find that migration is very sensitive to Hukou, with the greatest sensitivity occurring during the middle period.