Flexible employment and social insurance in China: coverage and scheme participation

Abstract Assessing social insurance coverage requires knowing both whether workers are insured and which schemes cover them. This study uses 29,527 person-wave observations on 16,945 non-agricultural workers aged 16–59 in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 China Family Panel Studies to examine overall coverage, scheme composition and differences between pensions and medical insurance together. Flexible employment comprises own/family work and employment without a written labour contract; these survey categories do not identify platform workers. In the full analysis sample, flexible employment is associated with employee-pension and employee-medical participation probabilities that are lower by 23.7 and 31.2 percentage points after covariate adjustment. The corresponding differences in coverage by any listed basic or public programme are smaller, at 14.2 and 4.1 points. In 2022, flexible workers report 60.9% pension coverage and 90.9% medical coverage. Resident schemes account for most medical coverage, whereas substantial pension non-coverage remains. Separate employment-category models show a larger employee-medical gap for own/family workers than for employees without contracts. Individual fixed-effects and adjacent-wave comparisons also show lower employee-scheme participation during flexible employment. These observational findings distinguish incomplete coverage from differences in scheme participation and identify different priorities across the two insurance domains during 2018–2022.