Social Security for state-sector workers in the People's Republic of China: the reform decade and beyond.

This article deals only with social security for workers in China’s urban sector. Social security for the state work force, primarily income-security programs for state enterprises, faces unprecedented challenges caused by a decade of policy changes and experiments in social security and in enterprise and labor-force reforms. Serious problems in funding and administering these programs have surfaced. Social security expenditures are rising rapidly. There are also signs of widespread mismanagement and discrepancies between enterprise implementation and local and central government guidelines and between local government guidelines and central government regulations. Recent developments suggest that, while the central government is poised to correct some of these problems, some broad policy issues remain: Can China afford the high price of social security for state-sector workers as its population ages? How will Chinese leaders balance their inclination to placate state-sector workers with social security benefits against the need to control these costs?