from East Asia and highlights important questions on retirement behavior in developing countries that may be addressed from new panel data initiatives currently underway.

# **Employment Patterns and the Retirement of Older Workers**

In China, long-term urban residents with formal sector employment can expect to receive a pension upon retirement, but face mandatory retirement at a relatively young age.<sup>5</sup> Where urban employed men confront mandatory retirement at age 60, women in blue collar occupations are frequently required to retire at age 50, those in white collar occupations at age 55, with women in some categories (e.g., university professors) able to work until age 60. Among current retirement-age residents of urban areas, a large share is receives relatively generous pension support. By contrast, rural elderly, who had lower incomes during their working lives and less accumulated wealth than their urban counterparts (Kanbur and Zhang, 1999; Ravallion and Chen, 2007), do not typically have pension income. According to the 2005 one percent population sample, 45.4 percent of urban residents over age 60 report pension income as their most import source of financial support, but only 4.6 percent of rural residents note an important role for pension income. Instead, 38 percent of rural respondents over age 60 report that income from own labor is their most important source of support.<sup>6</sup> The stark difference in employment rates of rural and urban residents reflects differences in both pension wealth and mandatory retirement provisions across urban and rural areas.<sup>7</sup> As evident in Panel A of Figure 1 below, which presents locally weighted regression (LOWESS) estimates of employment rates by age, China’s rural residents are far more likely to be employed well after the mandatory retirement ages faced by urban residents. From the China Health and Retirement

> 5We define a long-term urban resident as an urban dweller with an urban (non-agricultural) residential registration ( _hukou_ ) status. While considerable efforts have been made recently to extend social insurance benefits to migrants living in the city, migrants are much less likely to have employment contracts and to have employers who are making mandated contributions to pension, health and disability insurance programs (Giles, Park and Wang, 2011). 6Additional descriptive statistics on sources of support from the 2005 one percent population subsample are reported in Cai et al (2011) and Giles, Wang and Zhao (2010).

> 7In defining “employment” in this paper, we include wage employment in the informal sector, casual work, selfemployed activities and unpaid work in family run enterprises, all of which may be important for older workers in these economies. We focus on employment as opposed to labor force participation, per se, for two reasons. Job search is often not well-documented, and where it is (e.g., the CHARLS data for China) there are a vanishingly small number of respondents (five in CHARLS) over age 45 who are not employed but report active searches for work. We have no doubt that a search process exists for older workers who wish to work, but it is difficult to capture, and this is particularly true when large shares of older workers are self-employed.

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