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Working Pensioners in China: Financial Necessity or Luxury of Choice?

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Abstract

Retirement refers to a socially defined and usually irrevocable event in the life course of every worker in modern societies with an established pension system (Kohli 1986) and involves the cessation of work in the labour market. Increasingly, however, retirement is no longer an irrevocable life event, since many older workers do not withdraw from the labour market completely, but continue working past pension age (Scherger et al. 2012). It is important to clarify whether continued work means greater choice or is the consequence of a necessity to finance old age, especially in a rapidly transforming society such as China where the pension system does not yet cover the whole population. Working pensioners and their motivations and reasons for working past retirement are, therefore, of interest to researchers and policy makers interested in social inequalities.

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© 2015 Ge Yu and Klaus Schömann

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Yu, G., Schömann, K. (2015). Working Pensioners in China: Financial Necessity or Luxury of Choice?. In: Scherger, S. (eds) Paid Work Beyond Pension Age. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435149_7

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