Urban Unemployment Duration Analysis in Post-Reform China

Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2014

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2005

The two largest countries, China and India have relatively small shares of the population living in urban areas (43.2% and 29.5% respectively). Urban issues are important, because, although the share of the population living in urban areas is low, the rate of urban population growth is quite high. Service provision often can not keep up with the rate of urban population growth which results largely from rural to urban migration. At the global level urban population growth was 2% in 2008, however, as shown in Table 4, the rate was higher in the three sub-regions considered. Urban populations of SouthEast Asia grew by 3.1% in 2008, South and SouthWest Asia by 2.6% and East and NorthEast Asia by 2.3%.

IZA Journal of Labor & Development, 2014

This paper describes the Longitudinal Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC), a unique data source in terms of spatial coverage and panel dimension for research on labor markets in China. The survey is a collaboration project between the Australian National University, Beijing Normal University and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), which makes data publicly available to the scientific community by producing Scientific Use Files. The paper illustrates the structure, sampling frame and tracking method of the survey, and provides an overview of the topics covered by the dataset, and a review of the existing studies based on RUMiC data. JEL codes C81; J01; P36; R23

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 2019

Based on a survey conducted after the reform of the residential registration system (hukou in Chinese), this paper explores housing tenure change among China's rural-urban migrants in a medium-size city. It emphasizes the long-term effect of their initial hukou status which encapsulates the conditions in their place of origin and the social capital these represent. Our study presents two major findings: One, the initial housing tenures of rural migrants differ because their tenure choice reflects their socio-demographic characteristics and their migration record; the latter expresses their moving history as well as their short-and long-term objectives. Two, the current tenure choice of rural migrants is pathdependent-once they choose the initial tenure, they will be more (or less) likely to choose a specific subsequent one, leading ultimately to the current tenure. The national reform of the hukou system is fundamental to the understanding of their housing careers. This reform made it possible to change the hukou obtained at birth to a local one, giving the migrant access to a wide range of facilities and social services. Homeownership became the usual key to unlock these benefits. Migrants who intend to settle permanently at their destination may therefore be expected to purchase a dwelling later in their housing career. Adopting a housing policy that sets migrants on the path to homeownership, allows a city to bind desirable migrants. That path appears to be conditioned by the early steps in the migration experience. Therefore, the local housing policy should be concerned with accommodating the housing needs of newly arriving migrants.

The recent decade has witnessed dramatic labor adjustments in China’s state sector, as Chinese leaders have begun to directly address the problem of labor redundancy to reverse the money-losing situation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). While industrial restructuring is an inevitable feature of market transition, such reforms have resulted in an unprecedented loss of

Urbanization is considered one of the most important factors of the ongoing economic and industrial development in China during the last thirty years of the modern history. Studies shows that 20% of China’s population in 1980 lived in urban areas, compared to nearly half of the population in 2010. Urbanization is the transformation of rural areas into urban ones as a consequence of the economical and industrial development. Internal migration of population from rural to urban regions has played the main role in serving this urbanization. Official statistics indicates that China’s urban population has nearly doubled the last 35 years, and about half of this increase is a result of the internal migration which considered the largest in history. Rural-urban migration has played over the last 30 years and still playing an important role in shaping the demographic atmosphere as well as the economic development of Chinese cities. The household registration system, better known as the Hukou system, has played an important role in organizing the population movements over the country. It was the government’s main tool in controlling and pursuing the state’s economic and social plans. This paper provides a brief review of the history of the internal migrations in China over the last thirty years. In addition to a detailed defining of the relationship between the Hukou system and the rural-urban migration, and the effect of it over the migration process. The paper also studies the main reasons for migration and the effects of rural-urban migration on the rural and urban areas. “...some Chinese official reports even announced that China's urban population proportion reached 46 percent in 1987. By their definition, nearly half of the Chinese people are urban now! This seeming "great leap forward" is accounted a fact and highly praised by some western scholars ... But, ... it can’t fool the Chinese peasants themselves. In their eyes, the Hukou is the real standard by which to measure their actual status, benefits, and the progress of urbanization.” (Cheng, 1991, p. 292-93)

International Journal of Population Geography, 1999

This paper uses China's 1990 Census 1% microdata and studies interprovincial migration with reference to a core Chinese socioeconomic institution, the household registration (hukou) system. We ®rst compared the socioeconomic characteristics and geographical patterns of long-distance hukou and non-hukou migratory¯ows, and developed a framework of dual migration circuits. With this framework, we used a statistical model to evaluate migration rates in relation to both origin and destination variables. It was found that these two types of migrants shared some general demographic characteristics, but displayed substantial socioeconomic differences. Hukou migrants tended to originate in urban areas, had an extremely high share of the college-educated and were employed in more skilled jobs, while non-hukou migrants were mostly from rural areas with much lower education attainment. Hukou labour migrants tended to move through government and formal channels, while non-hukou migrants relied on their own, often informal, sources for jobs. We used a set of place-to-place migration models to assess the differential effect of the same variables on different types of migration. While hukou and non-hukou migration (including rural labour migration) were, as expected, deterred by distance and moved mostly to more economically developed coastal provinces, the

The integration of rural migrants into the urban labor market has become an essential economic issue in today's China. In the context of economic reforms, policies affecting migration in continental China have been redefined, which therefore greatly intensified the internal migration flows. Since the 1980s, the rural depopulation has been essentially linked to the migration of "peasant-workers" (ming gong) who continue to play a key role in the country's transition into a market economy. In this article, we study the integration of these rural migrants into the labor market in the Guangdong province using the original data from a 2006 survey of peasant-workers. Based on duration models estimation, the analysis focuses on the role of different characteristics: personal, temporal (i.e. the course of employment mobility through time) and spatial (i.e. the role of place of origin). Results show that migrants form a heterogeneous group in terms of personal characteristics and employability in the Pearl River delta. Women, the youth and the less qualified are among the advantaged. Geographical proximity also plays a favorable role. Finally, we examine the determinants of the wage in urban areas for peasant-workers who integrated the increasingly segmented and fragmented labor market.

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Journal of the European Economic Association

China’s hukou system imposes two main barriers to population movements. Agricultural workers get land to cultivate but are unable to trade it in a frictionless market. Social transfers (education, health, etc.) are conditional on holding a local hukou. We show that the land policy leads to over-employment in agriculture and it is the more important barrier to industrialization. Effective land tenure guarantees and a competitive rental market would correct this inefficiency. The local restrictions on social transfers also act as disincentives to migration with bigger impact on urban migrations than to job moves to rural enterprises.

Population Studies Center Research Report, 2005

Since 1955 the Chinese household registration system (hukou) has been used as the main tool to restrict rural-urban migration and allocating socialist benefits to urbanites. During the economic reform, while the system has become less effective, it continues to play a critical role in drawing segment boundary in China's emerging labor markets. This paper examines the rural-urban labor migration process and migrants' socioeconomic achievement in such segmented labor markets.

2003

We analyze the Hukou system of permanent registration in China which many believe has supported growing relative inequality over the last 20 years by restraining labour migration both between the countryside and urban areas and between regions and cities. Our aim is to inject economic modelling into the debate on sources of inequality in China which thus far has been largely statistical. We first use a model with homogeneous labour in which wage inequality across various geographical divides in China is supported solely by quantity based migration restrictions (urban-rural areas, rich-poor regions, eastern coastal-central and western (noncoastal) zones, eastern and central-western development zones, eastern-central-western zones, more disaggregated 6 regional classifications, and an all 31 provincal classification). We calibrate this model to base case data and when we remove migration restrictions all wage and most income inequality disappears. Results from this model structure point to a significant role for Hukou restrictions in supporting inequality in China, and show how economic rather than statistical modelling can be used to decompose inequality change. We then modify the model to capture labour efficiency differences across regions, calibrating the modified model to estimates of both national and regional Gini coefficients. Removal of migration barriers is again inequality improving but now less so. Finally, we present a further model extension in which urban house price rises retard rural-urban migration. The impacts of removing of migration restrictions on inequality are smaller, but are still significant.

Contemporary Economic …, 2009

The Regulation of Migration in a Transition Economy: China's Hukou System * Unlike most countries, China regulates internal migration. Public benefits, access to good quality housing, schools, health care, and attractive employment opportunities are available only to those who have local registration (Hukou). Coincident with the deepening of economic reforms, Hukou has gradually been relaxed since the 1980s, helping to explain an extraordinary surge of migration within China. In this study of interprovincial Chinese migration, we address two questions. First, what is a sensible way of incorporating Hukou into theoretical and empirical models of internal migration? Second, to what extent has Hukou influenced the scale and structure of migration? We incorporate two alternative measures of Hukou into a modified gravity model-the unregistered migrant's: (i) perceived probability of securing Hukou; and (ii) perceived probability of securing employment opportunities available only to those with Hukou. In contrast to previous studies, our model includes a much wider variety of control especially important for the Chinese case. Analyzing the relationship between Hukou and migration using census data for 1985-90, 1995-2000 and 2000-05, we find that migration is very sensitive to Hukou, with the greatest sensitivity occurring during the middle period.

The hukou system is typically treated as an institutional base for rural-urban chasm in the literature regarding internal migration in China. However, these works rarely separate hukou's social impacts from those caused by the changes in the economic system itself. With a review of historical policy documents, data on migration from rural to urban sectors, agricultural output and industrial output growth, I argue that hukou is in fact a rather neutral and passive legislation in the sense that it can perform opposite functions depending on the particular economic system it is operating under. This paper calls for bringing the concept of economic system back to the center of the discussion regarding development models.