Pension Changes in China and Opportunities for Insurance
In face of the large ageing population and increasing dependence ratio, China is aiming to find an efficient, stable, and sustainable pension system. This article briefly examines the changes that have occurred in China's pension system and explores the pros and cons of the current system. Although China has made a good start in laying the foundation for a multi-pillar pension system, pension reform is still incomplete and many important issues remain. Since the social insurance system alone cannot realistically accomplish the task of old-age security, the private sector, including the insurance industry, should be mobilized to play an active role in China's pension system.
Filial piety by contract? The emergence, implementation, and implications of the "family support agreement" in China.
China has the largest aging population in the world today. Despite the Chinese tradition of filial piety, economic, social, cultural, and familial changes have made it increasingly difficult for older Chinese to receive support from adult children. To ensure parental support, the Family Support Agreement (FSA) emerged from a local community in the mid-1980s. Since then, the FSA has been promoted and monitored by the government. By the end of 2005, FSAs had been signed by more than 13 million rural families across China and is now finding its way into cities. A voluntary contract between older parents and adult children concerning parental provisions, the FSA represents an innovation to help meet the challenge of providing elder support. Although the FSA's moral persuasion is based on filial piety, violations of the FSA are subject to penalties by law. As the first systematic and comprehensive exploratory study on the FSA, this article examines (a) the FSA's emergence, content, legal foundation, and implementation; (b) the role of the government and the legal system in promoting or monitoring FSAs; (c) the FSA's strengths, limitations, and challenges; (d) the FSA's implications in light of Chinese history, intergenerational contract, filial piety, and intergenerational relations; and (e) the future of the FSA as a social policy.
PDM and ERP integration methodology using digital manufacturing to support global manufacturing
Global manufacturing companies must implement manufacturing engineering with proper consideration given to the manufacturing process and resources that are appropriate for the particularities of each manufacturing site. Particularly for effective enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation under a global manufacturing environment, the product data management (PDM) integration for product data is one of the important keys to success. For such product data integration, engineering bill of materials (EBOM) needs to be transformed to manufacturing bill of materials (MBOM), but the MBOM transformation must be done in such a way as to fit the particularities of each manufacturing site. In this process, a methodology appropriate for integration and transformation is required. This paper proposes digital manufacturing as the key tool of data integration between PDM and ERP. Digital manufacturing, as a technology possessing the physical and logical computer modeling and simulation technique for actual manufacturing, provides the methodology for transforming EBOM to MBOM that fits the particularities of each manufacturing site, based on the process and resource models which reflect the particularities of each manufacturing site. It also provides the methodology for MBOM verification and the process and resource model integration. Using such method, the MBOM and the process and resource data, verified and appropriate for each manufacturing site, can be sent to the ERP system.