Abstract
Reconciling the potentially conflicting goals between income benefits and employment has become one of the key issues in international disability policy for working-age persons with disabilities. Inspired by the often-criticized experience of disability income benefits having an exclusory effect on employment of persons with disabilities in welfare states by two mechanisms—the disincentive effect of the generous benefits based on the work incapacity of persons with disabilities and the impairment-based work disability assessment for attaining these benefits—this paper aims to examine how disability income benefits affect employment for persons with disabilities in China. Using the life-story interviews method, this paper found that the disability income benefits for persons with disabilities based on their work incapability create “quasi-employment” perceptions among recipients with disabilities. The impairment-based work disability assessment for attaining these benefits excludes persons with disabilities from formal employment but does open them to more informal employment. Implications for policy are discussed.
Highlights
Global disability policy for working-age persons with disabilities incorporates two potentially conflicting goals
The disability income benefits have been criticized for producing employment disincentives arising from the generous disability income benefits on the basis of the work incapacity of persons with disabilities, as well as producing the exclusionary effects caused by the impairment-based work disability assessment for attaining these benefits
We aimed to examine how disability income benefits based on impairment-based work disability assessment affect the employment of persons with disabilities in China
Summary
Global disability policy for working-age persons with disabilities incorporates two potentially conflicting goals. One is to ensure that they participate in the labor market with pay as full and equal as possible; the other is to provide adequate and reasonable income benefits for those who cannot work because of disability [1–3]. Disability income benefits, as the earning replacement system based on work disability, are well known to be important for persons with disabilities to improve their standard of living [4,5]. It has been criticized as a significant danger for marginalizing them from the labor market by two mechanisms. Persons with disabilities have often been considered as naturally and unproblematically dependent on state benefits and automatically excluded from employment in modern welfare states [6–8]
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