China’s Mobility Barriers and Employment Allocations

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016

Scholarship about the Chinese hukou (household registration) system has focused on the advantages and entitlements associated with urban hukou. This paper shifts attention to the key entitlement provided by rural hukou – village land. While early hukou reforms were mainly designed to open up urban labor markets to rural migrants, recent reforms have also begun to open up rural land markets, by replacing hukou-based land rights with market-based rights. These reforms are designed to facilitate land concentration and the transfer of land to outside developers and agribusiness companies, which has been hindered by hukou-based land rights. Underlying the reforms is the government's agenda of promoting large-scale agriculture and urbanization, both of which require the removal of a large portion of the rural population from the land. By focusing on land rights rather than urban benefits, this paper provides a new perspective on the evolution of the hukou system, and highlights the negative implications of recent reforms for livelihood security in the countryside.

China Economic Review, 2011

Rural-urban migration flows are a crucial corollary of economic development. The adverse or beneficial effects of internal migration, for sending as well as receiving areas, and the definition of optimal migration policies, have remained much discussed issues since the seminal works of Harris and Todaro (1970). This debate is especially acute in China where the "household registration system" (hukou) acts as a strong constraint on individual migration. This paper aims to assess the consequences of hukou through a simple model of a developing dual economy with overlapping generations. Contrary to existing studies focused on the contemporaneous allocation of economic resources, it deals with the dynamic consequences of migration flows and migration policies. It shows that, in fairly general circumstances, hukou-related migration constraints can actually hasten development, understood as the transfer of the labor force to the modern sector, driven by capital accumulation. The hukou system could thus be one of the causes of the extremely high Chinese saving rate and of the high pace of Chinese development.

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.

China Perspectives, 2008

World Development, 2011

Obstacles to internal migration in China contribute to inefficiency, inequality, and land degradation. Academic and policy debate has primarily focused on discrimination against rural migrants on arrival in urban areas. Meanwhile, barriers to migration out of rural areas have received less attention. This paper examines the role of incomplete rural property rights in the migration decisions of rural households. We examine the relationship between tenure insecurity and restrictions on land rentals, and participation in outside labor markets. The results indicate that tenure insecurity reduces migration. This relationship is particularly pronounced on forest land, which has implications for the conservation of recently replanted forest areas.

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.

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

"In the processes of enclosing rural land for urbanization, village collectives have paradoxically become mechanisms for severing hukou relationships and building new institutions of property ownership and belonging. State-led processes of village demolition and relocation are negotiated and channeled through rural collectives. The administrative process of urbanization often goes through stages in which village land and farmland are enclosed separately. During this transitional period, villagers are dispersed and resettled in urban (or suburban) developments. Villagers maintain their hukou and ownership over their farmland, but are frequently prevented from continuing cultivation by prohibitive obstacles such as distance or the severing of irrigation infrastructure. Compensation for farmland, when it arrives, is not based on the actual market value of urban land, and does not provide an adequate basis for retirement. Thus, villagers must find new livelihoods while also facing the increased economic demands of an urban life. Employment opportunities for less educated and older villagers are scarce, especially in the high-tech industrial sectors for which rural land is often requisitioned. In the sense that displaced “collectives” are no longer engaged in production, but are only awaiting compensation for ceded property, agricultural hukou status comes to simply signify “not fully urban.” It is a transitional placeholder for the millions of rural villagers that are undergoing the social process of urbanization. Though fraught with continuing inequalities, the transition from an agricultural-centric to an urban-centric understanding of hukou represents a reorganization of the principal tool through which the state maintained urban-rural social distinction and control over the past six decades. The degree to which hukou socioeconomic inequalities become further entrenched by market mechanisms and new forms of segregation such as peripheral relocation settlements remains to be seen. "

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)

The Chinese Economy, 2006