Page 18 - Accelerating Research and Impact - Issue 6

Institutional constraints
to the extension of social insurance coverage to informal economy workers in China
While urban employee social insurance has widened significantly in recent years, workers in the informal economy lack pension and medical coverage to the extent and at the levels of adequacy enjoyed by urban formal employees.
China’s fragmented and decentralised social protection delivery and fiscal systems limit the country’s capacity to implement national policy guidelines promoting social insurance coverage.
The decentralisation of social insurance administration creates opportunities for service innovation, responsiveness, and adaptation to local social and economic circumstances.
However, the mismatch between national policy objectives and local capacities and incentives for their implementation crowd out efforts to secure the adequate protection of workers in the informal economy.
This research considers institutional and administrative barriers for expanding social insurance coverage to workers in the informal economy in China, and presents some of the causes of these misalignments and illustrates some ways through which China is attempting to overcome regulatory and administrative barriers to policy implementation.
Conducted by Prof Joshua Ka Ho MOK and Prof Vincent Zhouyi WEN from Institute of Policy Studies with their collaborators from National Singapore University and Hong Kong Baptist University, the research has created its impact with citation by the International Labour Organization.
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