Lihua Pang, Assistant Professor Institute of Population.pdf

April 9, 2004 Working Until Dropping: Employment Behavior of the Elderly in Rural China Lihua Pang, Assistant Professor Institute of Population Research, Peking University, Beijing, China Alan de Brauw, Assistant Professor Department of Economics, Williams College, Williamstown, MA Scott Rozelle, Professor Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Davis Working Until Dropping: Employment Behavior of the Elderly in Rural China In developing countries aging is in many ways more difficult than in developed countries. In order to simply maintain the same standard of living as they age, people must rely on pensions, their savings and/or their children or other relatives. However, people in developing countries often cannot choose among the three. Few developing nations offer formal pension plans for rural residents. Nor can they live off of their savings; rural residents in developing countries are generally poor and are not able to accumulate much wealth during their lifetimes. Therefore, in developing countries rural residents typically rely on extended family to support them in their old age.1 Life in rural China traditionally has been like rural life in many other developing countries as family has played an important role in taking care of the elderly. Traditionally, after using their own accumulated savings, the rural elderly rely on support from their children to maintain their standard of living. Moreover, despite social change that is occurring during the st 1990s and the first years of the 21 century, reliance on children primarily means reliance on the support of sons. In a typica