Migration and Wealth in Rural China: A multi-level analysis of CFPS 2010-2018

• In Event: 30852 - Wealth

Abstract

The debate on migration and the economic betterment of origin family has vacillated since the 1950s. In recent decades, empirical evidence has supported the positive economic outcome of migration under internal and international contexts, supporting the New Economics of Labor Migration. However, arguments about intensified urban consumerism and work precarity highlight how migration may stunt migrant households’ development, especially considering the more comprehensive and durable measurement of economic well-being such as wealth. Post-socialist China has witnessed an unprecedentedly massive wave of (often seasonal) rural-to-urban migration in pursuit of economic development. Three decades since the first wave of migration, the new generation of migrant workers (born after 1980), facing considerably harsher job market prospect and urban consumption influence, has become China’s main force of internal migration. Drawing on nationally representative longitudinal wealth data from the China Family Panel Study, this study explores old and new generation migrants’ contribution to rural household wealth from 2010 to 2018. Comparing OLS, county fixed-effects, and family fixed-effects models, the analysis reveals structural disparities in economic opportunities among regions and between rural households that need to send migrants and those that don’t. Although migrant families in general did better in years sending new-generation migrants than years keeping them local, they are still accumulating less than families that don’t need to send migrants at all, thereby widening local inequality. Cross region comparison also shows that the underdeveloped region is the least likely to benefit from new-generation migration, leaving regional inequality exacerbated. Such dynamics are not found among old-generation migrants.

Author

• Di Xin, New York University