The diffusion of international models in China’s Urban Employees’ Social Insurance

This study seeks to explain why China’s Urban Employees’ Social Insurance (UESI) features models that can be considered internationally mainstream in three of its branches (pensions, work accidents and unemployment), but fringe models in the other two (healthcare and maternity). Focusing on learning as a mechanism of diffusion, it compares the five insurance programmes of the UESI regarding the influence of domestic and international factors on the outcomes. Compared to previous work on Latin America, the study identifies new factors influencing learning processes, such as economic transition in the case of unemployment insurance. Furthermore, the study finds deviations from previously established connections between the complexity of policy subsystems and the synthesis of different policy options. Nevertheless, the results largely corroborate previous arguments about complexity: policy subsystems with a smaller number of international models are more conducive to adopting simple, neat policy models.