Income Stratification of Potential Care Workers among Internal Migrants in China

         
Author Name OKUBO Shoki (University of Tokyo) / KAWATA Keisuke (University of Tokyo) / YIN Ting (Fellow, RIETI) / ZHONG Renyao (East China Normal University)
Creation Date/NO. October 2019 19-E-079
Research Project Economic Analysis of the Development of the Nursing Care Industry in China and Japan
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Abstract

In China, the demand for care work is increasing with the aging of the population. Care services are mainly provided by internal migrants and their wages are found to be particularly low among internal migrants. However, there are few articles that have examined disparities of potential care workers using nationally representative internal migrant data. In terms of the different types of disparities, there are two main forms: inequality and stratification. Inequality refers to variation in absolute levels, whereas stratification refers to segmentation of relative ranks. This paper measures how the stratification index of potential care workers among internal migrants has changed from 2011 to 2015. The results of a nonparametric stratification index (NSI) shows that income stratification between care/non-care work exhibits a declining trend. Decomposition analysis revealed that NSI in each year was apparent by between gender stratification rather than within gender stratification. Furthermore, counterfactual analysis shows that income stratification between care/non-care work would have risen even more than it actually did if care/non-care work differences in educational attainment had remained at their 2011 levels.