This competitive, renewal proposal is to fund waves 3 and 4 of the China Health and Retirement Study (CHARLS). CHARLS is directly patterned on the HRS and its sister surveys in England, Europe, Japan, Indonesia and South Korea. The new HRS surveys in India (LASI) and Thailand (HART) have used the CHARLS survey modules as the starting point of their modules. The CHARLS national baseline survey was conducted in 2011-12. It is a nationally representative survey that includes one person per household aged 45 years of age or older and their spouse (totaling 17,708 individuals) living in 10,257 households in 450 villages/urban communities in 150 counties/districts in 28 of China's 30 provinces excluding Tibet. The CHARLS national baseline data have recently been released publicly, 11 months after completing field operations. Wave 2 was fielded in the summer and fall of 2013. It will be publicly released by fall of 2014. Some 91% of wave 1 respondents were re-contacted in wave 2, plus a small refresher sample of new respondents who had reached age 45 since wave 1, plus some households that we were unable to contact in the baseline, that we found and interviewed in wave 2. A special wave to collect life history data will be fielded in the summer of 2014, using resources from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and other sources. We want to continue CHARLS, getting the full benefit of building a publicly available panel data set, by fielding CHARLS for 2 additional waves, 3 and 4, thus establishing CHARLS as an ongoing biennial panel survey, like the HRS and its other sister surveys in Europe and Asia. An HRS-type survey in China has been past overdue. The importance of research on aging is recognized world-wide, where numerous high-quality surveys modeled after the US Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and funded by National Institute on Aging (NIA), are ongoing. Developing countries, especially in Asia, are going through rapid demographic and health transitions in which the elderly become much more prominent and the nature of health problems changes from infectious diseases, which affect mainly the young, to chronic diseases, which affect the elderly. Moreover, they are undergoing the aging process at much lower income levels than was the experience in industrial countries. China is a prominent example. China has more elderly than any country in the world and is one of the fastest-aging countries in the world today. China's population is aging at income levels far lower than was true for industrial countries and aging faster than other currently developing countries. Compared to most other countries with Health and Retirement Studies, China is much more rural, with lower levels of schooling among the elderly, lower levels of public services available, and an enhanced importance of the family for social security. Given these major challenges facing China to meet the needs of a rapidly aging population, there is significant value in continuing to make a high quality panel data set on aging available to international researchers.
The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) has already begun to enrich the international landscape of aging studies. CHARLS follows closely the existing Health and Retirement Studies around the world in order to provide the capability for scholars to engage in comparative studies as well as studies of the special conditions in China. The first two national waves of CHARLS were fielded in 2011 and 2013 and waves 3 and 4 are planned for 2015 and 2017.
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