Housing Poverty and Healthy Aging in China: Evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Background: Although prior research on the housing–health linkage suggested that those with poor housing conditions are more likely to report poor health, it is dominated by Western studies and offers little evidence on the housing–health relation in China. Scarce is empirical evidence on the potentially detrimental impact of either qualitative or quantitative housing poverty on health outcomes, especially for seniors in China. This paper aims to fill this void by using data from the 2011–2015 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to provide a comprehensive analysis of the demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral factors that contribute to changes in healthy aging among Chinese adults aged 60 and over. Methods: Data collected from 8839 adults aged 60 and over in the 2011 and 2015 CHARLS (3732 in 2011 and 5107 in 2015) were used. We first used six blood-based biomarkers to construct a composite measure of the Chinese Healthy Aging Index (CHAI, ranging from 0 (healthiest) to 12 (unhealthiest)) and then assessed the psychometric properties of the CHAI score, including acceptability, internal consistency, convergent validity, discriminative validity and precision. In addition, we employed both mean-based Blinder–Oaxaca and unconditional quantile regression decomposition to decompose the change in healthy aging within the 2011–2015 period. Results: We overall identified a decrease in CHAI score from 5.69 in 2011 to 5.20 in 2015, which implies an improvement in healthy aging during this period. Our linear decomposition revealed that dependent on the type of measure used (whether quality, quantity, or combined quality–quantity), housing poverty explained 4–8% of the differences in CHAI score. Our distributional decompositions also highlighted an important role for housing poverty in the change in healthy aging, accounting for approximately 7–23% of the explained portion. Within this latter, the relative contribution of housing quantity and quality poverty was more pronounced at the median and upper end of the CHAI distribution. We also found household expenditure to be significantly associated with healthy aging among older Chinese adults and made the largest contribution to the improvement in healthy aging over time. Conclusions: The association between housing poverty and CHAI is independent of household expenditure. Regardless of type, housing poverty is positively associated with a decrease in healthy aging. Thus, improved housing conditions boost healthy aging, and housing amelioration initiatives may offer the most effective solution for augmenting healthy aging in China. Improvement of flush toilets and the access to potable water and a separate kitchen require particular attention. Since high-density congested housing has a negative impact on healthy aging, more attention can also be paid to improvements in the available space for older people. Especially at an institutional level, the government may extend the housing policy from a homeownership scheme to a housing upgrading scheme by improving housing conditions.

Principles for Designing New Types of Housing for a Strong and Resilient Local Economy in the Republic of Congo

“…This thorny issue raises a fundamental problem of inequality and social injustice in terms of housing. It is imperative to stress that the European city and the city of the natives were conceived on the basis of colonial principles which advocated the separation of spaces in a segregationist perspective [17] [18]. Watercourses, ravines and railways, to name but a few, were used to separate these two spaces (the European town and the city of the natives) [6] [7].…”

Housing Unaffordability and Adolescent Subjective Well-Being in China

“…Despite broad analytic evidence of the links between housing characteristics and adult health and well-being (Cattaneo et al, 2009;Clair & Hughes, 2019;Diepstraten et al, 2020;Gibson et al, 2011;Katz et al, 2001;Kling et al, 2007;Ludwig et al, 2013;Nie, Li, Ding, et al, 2021;Palacios et al, 2021;Pollack et al, 2004), the effect of housing unaffordability on child SWB or mental disorder has received far less attention (Clair, 2019). More important, little consensus exists on how negative this effect might be.…”

Exploring the experiences and expectations of pharmacist interns in large general hospitals in China: from the perspective of interns

“…The increasing number of hospital pharmacists, coupled with a growing and aging population [1], provides a timely opportunity for hospital pharmacists in mainland China to become direct pharmaceutical care providers [2]. However, the current school-based pharmacy education in China is biased toward basic knowledge such as medicinal chemistry and pharmacology, and there is a great lack of training in clinical practice skills, making the hospital pharmacists unable to meet the demand for pharmacy services with their existing professional knowledge, skills, or competency [3].…”

“…Clinical practical skills such as rapid identification of drug quality, use of automated equipment, pharmacy monitoring, patient consultation, therapeutic drug monitoring, and pharmacy knowledge including pharmacotherapeutics and clinical pharmacology were also given full consideration [10]. However, there are still some flaws with the current HBPI in mainland China: (1) there is a lack of nation-level operational guidelines; (2) there is no bidirectional evaluation tool for evaluating the effectiveness of internships; (3) the training content of the HBPI is not well integrated with the existing education activities, which could increase the burden of interns and lead to the accumulation of negative emotions. The above factors tend to affect the experiences and gains of pharmacist interns, which have long been significant reasons why the current HBPI can hardly meet the demand for pharmacy services [11][12][13][14].…”