Abstract
Ageing pressure is considered to be a critical subject to the pension system in its own right and a vast amount has been written under this heading. This paper s empirical section is based on two datasets: one is the 2001' Shanghai Fifth National Population Census (SFNPC); the other is the 1990's Shanghai Floating Population Census (SFPC). My main aim here is trying to project & test: under current rapid migration, is so called replacement migration a feasible solution to sharply declining and ageing China urban population? Also from the replacement migration point of view, my paper briefly analyzes how China's urban pension system would react in the future.
Some concepts that will frequently be used in this paper are defined as follows. The "Floating Population"(FP) here refers to the people who temporally or permanently live in urban (i.e. Shanghai), but without "residence permit"(in Chinese, which called "Hukou"). In general, the floating population can't benefit from the pension system sponsored by the government, but should pay tax just as same as what urban residents do under current "Floating Population Regulation". According to some specific standards, we could divide the FP into two subgroups, one is the People who just temporally live in urban ( Temporary Floating Population or TFP), and the other is the ones who permanently live in urban ( Permanent Floating Population or PFP).
The analyses begin with an interesting contradiction. According to some former population projections from the 1990s, Shanghai should have experienced a rapid ageing, and such trend should continue until 2030s when it reaches its peak. But, in fact, according to 2001' Fifth National Population Census (note 1), the ratio of dependency (60+) seems to remain constant (maybe even decline) compared with that of the 1990s. What is the explanation? The answer is simple! All the Shanghai population projections so far are based on the assumption that the migration is strictly & perfectly controlled, and that it has an insignificant effect on Shanghai's population variation (note 2). Now, we can see that this is an extremely unrealistic assumption. Meanwhile, I should point out, that there were no data about the FP, especially about the PFR, before the Fifth National Population Census (FNPC). This greatly limited the related empirical research.
The basic idea of my thesis is below. Previous related research was always based on the assumption of a closed population; intuitively, such precondition is too unrealistic due to last ten years migration. At present, it is possible & necessary to include the factor of migration into population projections. Furthermore, from this point of view, almost all urban economic indexes (such as the GDP per capita, etc; and in some popular pension models, for example in RMSM (Revised Minimum Standard Model) model developed by World Bank, these per-capita-indexes are crucial and sensitive to final conclusion) need carefully revised when we realize the FP s significant effect. In this paper, I will firstly attempt to estimate the level of FP, and then use FP-adjusted data to test & re-estimate some popular belief about the Chinese urban pension system under a general theoretical analysis framework.
1.The best important feature of 2001 Fifth National Population Census is that the FP who have continually lived somewhere other than hometown for 6 months or above should participate the current-lived place s registration. Formerly, all FP need go back hometown attend census. To some extend, this adjustment of census policy also reflect the significant fact that there are great migration from rural to city take place during last decade.
2.Before the economic reform, legal migration in China required removal certificates from place of origin, documentation of job offers, etc, and in fact the policy of forced rustication stopped the possibility of migrating from rural areas to the city.