LAUSR

Abstract There exist three pension systems for urban older residents in China: the pension for government and public institutions (PGPI), the worker's old-age insurance for enterprise employees (WOI) and the urban residents’ social pension insurance (URSPI). This study examines how this multi-track pension system relates to older urbanites’ life satisfaction. The ordered logistic regression model was fitted to analyse the urban sample of the China Longitudinal Ageing Social Survey (60+ years), a nationwide representative survey collected in 2014. The mediation analyses were further adopted to investigate the potential formative mechanisms. A significantly higher level of life satisfaction was detected for those who receive PGPI benefits relative to those who have access to URSPI and WOI, but no significant difference is detected between URSPI and WOI. Further analyses suggest that the advantage of PGPI in terms of life satisfaction is mediated not through monetary resources, but through the dispositional factor of perceived self-value for the society. This study suggests that different institutional configurations of the pension system stratify older urbanites’ subjective wellbeing by virtue of factors that are associated with people's capabilities of acting and functioning.