Abstract
The major source of income of Chinese farmers is non-farm income, especially wages and salaries. Based on the economics theory of health and healthcare, their non-farm labor supply behavior could be affected by health insurance policies. The work presented in this paper focuses on the impact of the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS) on farmers’ non-farm labor supply behavior in China. A four-part model regression approach was used to examine the relationship. Our dataset comprised of 8273 people, aged 45 or above, from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) conducted in 2011 and 2013. The empirical results showed that NRCMS significantly reduced non-farm labor force participation and employment. Compared to non-participants of the NRCMS, the non-farmer labor time of these participants reduced, but the supplementary medical insurance and immediate reimbursement of the NRCMS increased the participants’ non-farm labor time. Our results have contributed to the reform of China’s public health insurance and farms’ income growth, and it would be necessary to actively promote immediate reimbursement, gradually simplify reimbursement procedures for medical treatment in non-registered places, and eliminate the non-portability of NRCMS.
Highlights
IntroductionFor sure, will face a slowdown in the economic growth as the sustained and stable promotion of farmers’ income is facing a new development environment, which needs to adapt to new changes and challenges
Since 2000, China’s agriculture and rural economy have developed rapidly
Results showed that more than 17% of the 8237 samples had non-farm employment in the year before the interview, and more than 90% of the respondents had participated in New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS), indicating that NRCMS basically achieved the goal of covering all farmers
Summary
For sure, will face a slowdown in the economic growth as the sustained and stable promotion of farmers’ income is facing a new development environment, which needs to adapt to new changes and challenges. As an important part of the social security system, the public health insurance scheme helps to protect the physical and mental health of laborers, improve labor productivity, and promote development and increase residents’ income [2,3,4,5]. A large number of previous empirical studies have discussed the relationship between public health insurance and the labor market [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], Int. J. Public Health 2019, 16, 4865; doi:10.3390/ijerph16234865 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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