The Distance of Migration and the Breakdown of Protection: Pension Coverage of Rural Migrants in China

Using microdata from the 2015 China 1% Population Sample Survey, this paper examines pension coverage of migrants at destination. Based on 1,154,388 non-agricultural employed individuals aged 16–60 in 2,972 counties, I document four facts. First, migrants exhibit higher raw participation in urban employee pensions than locals, but this positive gap reflects destination selection: migrants concentrate in cities with stronger formal sectors. Conditional on county fixed effects and individual characteristics, migrants are 7.3 percentage points less likely to participate in urban employee pensions. Second, the gap widens with migration distance: intra-county movers are 3.0 percentage points more likely to participate, whereas same-city cross-county, same-province cross-city, and cross-province migrants are 1.3, 8.1 and 10.0 percentage points less likely, respectively. Third, the gap mainly reflects a coverage gap rather than low participation: 31.2% of cross-province migrants have no pension coverage, 13.3 percentage points higher than locals; the gap for rural-hukou migrants is concentrated in any-pension coverage (−10.6 percentage points), while for urban-hukou migrants it is concentrated in employee pensions (−8.9 percentage points). Fourth, the gap is larger in cities with stronger formal sectors and narrows with migration duration. These results should be interpreted as conditional differences rather than causal effects; improving pension portability and national pooling is key to narrowing the coverage gap.