The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) is a longitudinal survey being conducted by the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University with Professor Yaohui Zhao of Peking University serving as Principal Investigator and Professors John Strauss of the University of Southern California and Albert Park of HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies serving as co-Principal Investigators.
The survey will collect a representative sample of Chinese 45 and older every two years to enable multidisciplinary studies on issues related to population ageing.
[1] The pilot survey is funded by the National Institute on Aging, the World Bank, and Natural Science Foundation of China.
[3] The CHARLS is designed on the models of health and retirement studies originated from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in the U.S., but has the advantage of including information on the community the respondent resides and local policies.
The pilot survey was conducted in two provinces (Zhejiang and Gansu) in 2008 and collected data on roughly 1,600 households.