The New Cooperative Medical Scheme and Self-Employment in Rural China

Abstract

Using panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, this study estimates the effect of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) on self-employment in rural China, based on a difference-in-differences method (combined with propensity score matching). Specifically, we compare employment status of the participants and non-participants groups before and after the NCMS was implemented (within the common-support region). We found that the NCMS increased a rural resident's likelihood of shifting from working for others to self-employed by 38 percentage points and that of shifting from temporarily employed to self-employed by 23 percentage points. These results suggest that apart from reducing uncertainty in future spending for the insured due to catastrophic illness, universal health insurance could also have a positive effect on the labor market, namely, that of increasing rates of self-employment.

Which Factors Affect Landless Peasants’ Intention for Entrepreneurship? A Case Study in the South of the Yangtze River Delta, China

“…For example, the driving power of EI is 1, and the driving power of gender is 4. The dependence power is the total The adjacency matrix R of influencing factors is obtained according to Figure 1 and Equation 2, as shown in Equation (6).…”

“…Many landless peasants face significant challenges in employment, which is restricted by the economy, society, institutions, the culture background, capital, and other factors [6]. China has long been confronted with an accelerated stage of rural labor employment [7,8].…”

<p>A Triple-Difference Approach to Re-Evaluating the Impact of China’s New Cooperative Medical Scheme on Incidences of Chronic Diseases Among Older Adults in Rural Communities</p>

“…Somewhat counterintuitive, Lei and Lin (2009) 16 found that while the NCMS significantly increased utilization of preventive care, it did not improve the insureds' health outcomes. This lack of conclusive evidence is particularly puzzling given the findings of significant impacts of the NCMS on outcomes that are not highly health-related, such as durable/nondurable consumption, [17][18][19] selfemployment, 20 daily activities and cognitive function, 21 and child education. 22 In any case, these inconclusive findings render it difficult to derive useful lessons and policy recommendations regarding how the program can be further improved to achieve better population health outcomes or population well-being in other dimensions.…”

“…To address potential endogeneity issues raised by the voluntary nature of NCMS enrollment and unobserved confounding factors, most existing studies adopted the double-difference (difference-in-differences) method or its refined variations in their analyses. 8,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Yet to the best of our knowledge, only Bai and Wu (2014) 17 and Su et al (2017) 20 have tested the parallel-trend assumption needed for double-differencing to yield unbiased estimates. The falsification tests we perform in this re-evaluation study provide strong evidence against the plausibility of this identification assumption for a subset of chronic disease incidence outcomes.…”

The Effects of Health Status on Life Insurance Holdings in 16 European Countries

“…Buchmueller et al [5] observe that those with private health insurance have lower hospital utilization than those without private health insurance in Australia. In China, rural residents enrolled in The New Cooperative Medical Scheme have higher probability of shifting from working for others to being self-employed and from being temporarily employed to being self-employed [6].…”