Pension insurance for Chinese migrant workers: mission impossible? A proposal based on the EU experience.

Abstract

As China is undertaking industrialization and urbanization, millions of migrant workers flow to the cities and have made significant contributions to bring about economic growth. It is estimated that the number of migrant workers will stay constant or even increase in the near future. Complex social security issues of migrant workers have attracted the attention of both academics and governments to formulate relevant policies. This paper focuses on as one of the social security issues the pension insurance, and aims to propose a unified national pension insurance system for migrant workers. It provides an analysis of the different system models for the pension insurance policies for migrant workers earned out by central and local governments. These policies seek to explore a feasible way of the implementation of the pension insurance in order to raise the enrolment rate and bring down the withdrawal rate. Through the analysis of the case studies on the practices of several provinces, many problems would be illuminated. Learning from the model implemented in European Union, this paper seeks to give pragmatic advice to overcome these problems and barriers in order to establish a unified system at the national level.