Institutional Economic Analysis On The Impermanent Migration From Rural To Urban Of The Agricultural Labor In China

It is an inevitable outcome of economic development for the agricultural labor to migrate gradually toward the city. However, the migration in China has demonstrated a special characteristic of impermanence. That is, although many labors enter city and work in the non- agriculture industry, the majority has not settled down in the city, but commuted circularly between location (town) of job and family (country), living obvious an "amphibious" life.Impermanent migration emerged in the process of China's switch to market economy system, and was a rational choice under constraints. Compared with zero-migration, impermanent migration optimizes resources allocation, promotes economy growth. However, compared with permanent migration, it has also brought many negative influences on economic development. Actually, the phenomenon of rural labor migration has attracted concerns of many economic scholars both home and abroad. Lots Surveys and studies are conducted over the characteristics of the phenomenon, and analyses are made to explain its reasons and solutions. However, there are rare documents available studying impermanent labor migration China is witnessing and nor institutional analysis, which therefore, is this dissertation's task to explore the impermanent migration from rural to urban area with the methodology of institutional economics. The main contents are as follows:The first part gives a general overview of related research fruits and makes some evaluation. Researches abroad concentrated on permanent migration between rural and urban. Not until 20 century 80's, had the issue of impermanent migration aroused concerns of scholar abroad. Their studies included international impermanent migration and domestic impermanent immigration in Pacific Asian region, but these existing theories so far are still in lack of power of explaining of large-scale impermanent migration of agriculture labor in China. Domestic scholars'researches mainly concentrated on general analysis to significance, characteristics, trend, path, problem, conditions of labor migration, and solutions to the issue and so on. These valuable efforts and works, however, are seldom able to offer convincing explanations to the root cause of the phenomenon.The second part tries to depict characteristic path that China's reform takes towards the market economy. The reform has been conducted separately in rural and urban areas, and therefore the institutional changes that China is witnessing are extremely unbalanced. The primary institutional arrangement with typical traits of dualistic economics has greatly influenced the path and way of institutional changes in China. During the course of transformation carried out separately in inner rural areas and inner urban areas, the social economic body as a whole with obvious barriers between rural and urban areas has experience rare or slow changing. To offer a thorough explanation, a little game theory is consider useful, and is therefore adopted in order to analyze how interest relationships have also influenced this special unbalanced way of institutional changes.The third part aims to demonstrate the influences of unbalance institutional changes in rural and urban areas on labor migration. These influences on labor migration have happened in every stage of unbalanced institutional change. It is demonstrated that impermanent migration of agriculture labor is inevitable result of unbalance institutional changes in China. This part has also closely examined mechanism of unbalance institutional change, and respective influence of household of register system, labor market system, land system, social security system on transferring the agricultural surplus labor.In the fourth part, the theory of trade cost is applied to explain the concrete features of impermanent immigrate in China. Unbalanced institution change increases trade cost of transferring agriculture labor in China, which leads to a fact that rural employees who should migrate can not move, and some immigrates who should settle down can't settle down; further analyses are made to depict characteristics of migration distance, age, sex, education degree during impermanent migration with concrete data. It is argued that there is a close relation between these characteristic and trade cost sizes, and that impermanent immigrates would choose to migrate when their migration income makes up for cost.In the fifth part, a survey is carried out to examine performance of impermanent migration of agricultural employees between rural and urban areas in China. Compared with non-migration, this part proves the promoting function of impermanent migration of agricultural employees by analyses based on a great deal of statistics data. At the same time, compared with permanent migration, impermanent migration of agricultural employees also brought some negative effects. Finally, it is argued that promoting permanent migration of agricultural labor is of great necessity. The part also discusses the influence of the whole social security brought by impermanent migration, and argues that it is a dynamic process to increase welfare. The sixth part aims to work out suggested measures to promote permanent migration of agriculture labor in China. It is discussed how to break original interest pattern in the course of institutional change, how to reduce costs, and enhance revenue. In this part, some suggestions are made to choose suitable path to break unbalanced economic system and to help impermanent immigrates to settle down. Based on the above arguments, the author finally points out the emphasis of the reform to promote permanent migration of agricultural employees in China.