Abstract
The New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS) is one of the essential systems for ensuring public health in rural China. This paper investigates the effect of farmers' participation in the NRCMS on their subjective well-being and its mechanisms using data from the Chinese General Social Survey 2017. The results show that farmers' participation in the NRCMS significantly enhances their subjective well-being, and these results remain robust after regression with the instrumental variables method and propensity score matching method. Further analysis of the mechanisms suggests that participation in the NRCMS can enhance farmers' subjective well-being by increasing their consumption levels other than medical consumption. Moreover, medical consumption levels play a negative role in participating in the NRCMS on farmers' subjective well-being, which can be explained as the “masking effect.” The regression results of the subsamples show that the higher a farmer's income is, the less his or her participation in the NRCMS enhances subjective well-being. And the effect of participation in the NRCMS on farmers' subjective well-being is not significant if their health status is too high or too low.
Highlights
This paper examines the impact of China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS) on farmers’ subjective well-being and the mechanisms
The result, which is significant at the 1% level, shows that participation in the NRCMS increases farmers’ subjective well-being
This paper investigates the impact of farmers’ participation in NRCMS on their subjective well-being and its mechanisms using data from the China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2017
Summary
This paper examines the impact of China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS) on farmers’ subjective well-being and the mechanisms. Studies on Chinese rural residents showed that in addition to income level, health status, educational attainment, housing conditions, medical conditions, and perceptions of social equity could significantly affect their subjective well-being [19,20,21]. Following the general principle of diminishing marginal returns, the higher income level farmers enjoy, the less increase in subjective well-being such additional subsidies brings. There is a high probability that farmers in good health do not need medical care because they are less likely to be ill It means that participation in the NRCMS does not substantially improve their health and their subjective well-being. T-statistics are reported in parentheses; ***denotes significance at the 0.01 level; **denotes significance at the 0.05 level
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