Abstract
China, the world’s most populous country, has entered a period of rapid aging. But less work has been done in systematically assessing the health status and intergenerational support resources of the elderly, a growing proportion of whom may be with inadequate government or family support. This study employs Sullivan method and SOCSIM micro-simulation analysis technique on the aggregate data of China’s 1 % National Population Sample Survey in 2005, the Sixth National Population Census in 2010, and other aggregate census data in China since 1953 to estimate the changes of LE, DFLE, and the change of intergenerational support resources of Chinese elderly from gender and/or urban–rural perspectives. The results indicate that the proportion of DFLE in LE is increasing, the increasing speed of DFLE/LE is higher among rural/female elderly than that among urban/male elderly at all ages between 2005 and 2010, and the number of children of the elderly at lower ages keep decreasing, which indicate that they need more care resources in a near future. This study provides insight into imbuing community helping and pension institutions with gender and urban–rural differences in China.
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Notes
- 1.
2010 Main sixth national census data bulletin (No. 1), the National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China, April 28, 2011.
- 2.
About 90 % aged population cared in family, 7 % in community and 3 % in institutions.
- 3.
In accordance with internationally accepted standards, the disabled aged are those cannot dress, eat, bath, go to the toilet, carry out indoor sports, shop independently as the result of weakness, disability, illness, mental handicap, etc. (the aged loss of daily life self-care capacity).
- 4.
Based on the instruction of questionnaire of the China’s 1 % National Population Sample Survey in 2005, the term of “it depends” represents other situation the former three terms unable to include in. It contains the unstable health condition. So we put it into the category of “can not take care of themselves”. Furthermore, the percentage of choosing this was only 1.47 %.
- 5.
But it is difficult for us to obtain the information about surviving children according to data from previous censuses and sample surveys.
- 6.
It is known to all that any population will reach a stable level after experiencing a long period of steady fertility rates,death rates and marriage rates. So we emulated the data 200 years before the establishment of new China to obtain a stable population for SOCSIM micro-simulation analysis.
- 7.
It should be noted that, due to the number of advanced aged population will reduce dramatically, the proportion of the DFLE fluctuated slightly in 2005.
- 8.
The number of aged populations will decline considerably with age, thus the fluctuations of the number of the advanced aged were comparatively conspicuous.
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Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support from National Social Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 14CRK014. The Author is particularly grateful to his parents, Zhongwu Guo and Bifang Wang, who gave key advice about the implications of this analysis for policy of aging and pension reform in China.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Tables 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, 12.6, 12.7 and 12.8.
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Guo, W. (2017). The Changes of Disability-Free Life Expectancy and Inter-Generation Support for the Elderly in China: 2005–2010. In: Samanta, T. (eds) Cross-Cultural and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Social Gerontology . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1654-7_12
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