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Leaving China's Farms: Survey Results of New Paths and Remaining Hurdles to Rural Migration*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Scott Rozelle ,
Li Guo ,
Minggao Shen ,
Amelia Hughart  and
John Giles
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Extract

One of the striking outcomes of China's economic reforms is the emergence of inter-regional labour markets as rural workers have poured into the nation's urban and rural economies. Policy makers in China, as elsewhere in the world, have treated the inter-regional migrant labour force with ambiguity. Migration may increase efficiency, contribute to poverty reduction and make China's economy more competitive, but leaders fear the congestion, social unrest and loss of political control which might accompany an increasingly mobile labour force.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 158 , June 1999 , pp. 367 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1999

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References

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13. The survey also attempted to estimate the number of permanent outmigrants (yongjiu buanzou de ren/hu). For the purposes of this study permanent outmigrants are those who leave the village for employment purposes only, not because of marriage, education or retirement. Permanency, in contrast to long-term status, signals that the migrant has no intention of returning to or residing in the village in the near future. One signal of permanency may be that leaders officially transfer a household's or individual's residency permit (hukou) to another jurisdiction or unit. Such a transfer is not an adequate sign of permanency in itself because the residency permit may move even though the person continues to live in the village and has no intention of leaving. Alternatively, people can attain permanent migrant status without changing residency. For example, if a household's residency officially remained in the village, but it sold or leased its house and physically moved out of the village for several years, enumerators counted the members of such a household as permanent outmigrants. Leaving the village permanently was such a rare event that the survey tabulated the total number of households leaving the village in the periods 1989–95 and 1980–88. For the remainder of the article, migrants refer only to long-term, not permanent, migrants.

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75. Personal communication from Uma Lele, senior economist World Bank to senior author, January 1998.

76. The unit of observation is the village not the individual, so our results shed little light on the debate over who within the village chooses to migrate.

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78. We use two models, ordinary least squares (OLS) and tobit because the dependent variable, percentage of the village labour force in the migrant labour force, is limited. OLS results are efficient but slightly biased; tobit results arc not as efficient, but unbiased. Our conclusions rely primarily on the OLS results because only 6% of villages reported no migration (0%), so OLS bias is minimal.

79. Per capita village income in 1988 is used instead of per capita income in 1995 to avoid endogeneity. We expect that villages with high levels of migration may have higher incomes because of migration (migrants often send money home) and we wish to determine the effect of income on migration rather than the effect of migration on income.

80. Because this variable also captures all village characteristics not explicitly included in the regression, we explicitly include as many village characteristics as possible to isolate the chain effect.