A Study Of Influencing Factors Of Consumer Behavior Of Rural-to-Urban Migrants

After the 2008 world financial crisis, many government officials, economists and entrepreneurs in China have realized the weakness of the country's export-driven economy, which was shown by the sharp decrease of China's export volume hit by the financial crisis. Consequently, much of the government economic policies have shifted their focus on domestic demand.Immigrant workers as a group consists of 17.25 percent of China's population. Their consumption behaviors have great impact on China's domestic demand. Therefore, research on such issue should have important policy implications. "Immigrant workers" refers to a specific group of Chinese population, who emigrate from (western) rural areas to work in (eastern coastal) cities during the country's economic transition period. With the size of their population, immigrant workers have become the "third" driving force of domestic consumption (besides city and rural residents).Previously, much research has done on the consumption behavior of Chinese immigrant workers. However, to our best knowledge, most of these researches focus on a specific aspect of the issues. Because the consumption behavior of immigrant workers is affected by a number of interrelated factors, such as the degree of social and economic development, political system, consumption conception, cultural ideas, research focus on a single factor tends to miss the complexity of the consumption behavior of immigrant workers and the interrelation of such factors.This paper extends previous research to provide a systematic and comprehensive analysis on the consumption behavior of immigrant workers. Specifically, this study focuses on the following issues:(1) what are the main characteristics of the consumption behavior of immigrant workers? (2) What is the main structure of the consumption behavior of immigrant workers? How does such structure being developed? (3) How is the relation between income and consumption behavior of immigrant workers? (4) How does income transferring by immigrant workers to their families affect the urban and rural consumptions? (5) How do the systematic factors affect the consumption behavior of immigrant workers? (5) What kinds of policies can be implemented to encourage immigrant workers'consumption and thus increase domestic demand?Based on theories from management science, statistics and economics, we build our models and empirically study the above issues using actual data and questionnaire from experts. Our main findings can be summarized as followings:(1) Although their working conditions and incomes have improved, immigrant workers still maintain their country-side consumption behavior to a large degree. On the other hand, influenced by city life-style and cultural ideas, the consumption behavior of immigrant workers also exhibit to some extent city consumption characteristics.(2) In general, immigrant workers'wages are relatively lower than their city counterparts. Results from our descriptive statistics show that, before 2004, the wages of immigrant workers had grown little and stayed at a relatively lower level. After 2004, there have been some increase in immigrant workers'wages, but the growth rate has been much lower than the growth rate of GDP and the share of GDP contributed by immigrant workers.(3) Income is the most important factor affecting the consumption behavior of immigrant workers. Our regression results on the relation between immigrant workers'incomes and immigrant workers' consumption behavior show that immigrant workers'spending is greatly limited by their lower wage and income uncertainty.(4)We also analyze the characteristics of immigrant workers' consumption behavior using grey correlation method. (5) We argue that some systematic factors greatly restrict immigrant workers'spending. Among these systematic factors, household registration system is the most important factor. Therefore, to encourage immigrant workers to spend, the dual household registration system differentiating city residents from rural residents in China must be abolished.(6) We propose that a policy system for immigrant workers and the associated evaluating system should be established.(7)Finally, we make some policy recommendations to encourage immigrant workers to spend.