Abstract
In China, due to decades of the ‘one-child policy’ and continuous rural-urban labour migration, real population aging in rural areas is increasing more quickly than in urban areas, and the labour inputs in agricultural production are becoming ever more dependent on the elderly. Using CHARLS data, we examine the effect of health on the labour supply of rural elderly people. We construct a latent health stock index (LHSI) to eliminate measurement bias and then use this one-period lagged LHSI and the Heckman two-stage and the Bourguignon-Fournier-Gurand two-stage method to deal with the simultaneous causality of health and labour decisions and sample selectivity in model estimation. The results show that, in the overall level, the labour force participation and work time of rural elderly people increase significantly with the improvement of health. These effects on the males are sharply greater than on the females and are enhanced with age. In the subdivided agricultural and non-agricultural labour supply, health improvement is positively related with labour force participation of rural elderly and brings an employment allocation from agricultural section to non-agricultural section, especially on the males. However, as the work time, these relations are insignificant and invariant with gender and age.
Highlights
The growing aging population poses a huge challenge to China’s industrialization and modernization
This confirms the conclusion that the measurement error would underestimate the impact of health on labour supply and supports using the latent health stock index (LHSI) approach to increase the effectiveness and reliability of the estimation results [21]
Classifying labour force participation decisions as non-participation, agricultural labour supply, off-farm employment, and off-farm self-employment, we further investigate the effect of health on the labour force participation of rural elders
Summary
The growing aging population poses a huge challenge to China’s industrialization and modernization. Public Health 2019, 16, 1195 income maximization through the division of labour in the family This means that the labour input in agriculture depends on the long-term effective labour supply and allocation across agricultural and non-agricultural sectors for rural elderly people [3]. From this perspective, the realistic needs of China’s social and economic development require us to continue to study the labour supply of rural elderly people and identify the important determinants of their supply decisions through rigorous scientific analysis. Age and gender variation in the relationship between health and the labour supply decision and the difference of these relations between agricultural and non-agricultural employment are not discussed in-depth within an identical framework.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
