| Since China’s reform and opening up,China’s rapid urbanization and urban-rural dual structural system have given rise to a large group of rural migrant workers.Rural migrant workers,being the important force to propel China’s urbanization,have made enormous contribution to the city’s economic construction.However,they are unable to enjoy equal access to employment,health,social insurance,children’s education and other basic public services that only citizens can enjoy.Even worse,they are placed in tough situations of demanding payments,occupational injuries and family separation.Their welfare conditions arouse our concerns.To properly solve rural migrant workers’ welfare issue during the process of urbanization not only has a bearing on the dynamic foundation of China’s sustained and rapid economic growth,but also directly relates to the coordinated and harmonious development of the whole society.This dissertation originates from the idea of “status quo analysis—measurement of capability—influence on return—deprivation of capability—policy design”,uses the survey data of rural migrant workers in Shanghai from 2009 to 2012,and makes attempts to resolve five important problems about the welfare of rural migrant workers:(1)How to build an objective and effective evaluation index system of welfare,in order to accurately reflect rural migrant workers’ welfare conditions in the process of urbanization?(2)What are the main factors that influence welfare conditions of rural migrant workers?(3)What’s the relationship between rural migrant workers’ damaged welfare and their return?(4)What are the welfare poverty of rural migrant workers and the key influencing factors respectively?(5)Would the residence card system really improve rural migrant workers’ welfare? With the purpose of answering the above questions,this dissertation intends to illustrate from the following aspects:First of all,the theoretical analytical framework of rural migrant workers’ welfare is constructed and descriptive statistical method is adopted to compare the welfare conditions of rural migrant workers horizontally(rural migrant workers vs.citizens)and vertically(in different years).In the vertical analysis,different groups of rural migrant workers are compared in light of economic conditions,protective security,working conditions,living conditions and psychological feelings during the four years from 2009 to 2012.In the horizontal analysis,the welfare differences between rural migrant workers and citizens are compared from five aspects of health insurance,education for their children,housing situation,working time and economic conditions so as to get a comprehensive and exquisite understanding of the basic situations’ of rural migrant workers.Secondly,the welfare index system of evaluation is constructed from five dimensions such as economic conditions,protective security,working conditions,living conditions and psychological feelings of rural migrant workers.The welfare level of rural migrant workers is measured by using fuzzy mathematical methods,and the quantile regression is adopted to analyze the influence of personal characteristics,family features,human and social capital on the welfare of rural migrant workers.The study discovers that the welfare conditions of rural migrant workers are still at a relatively low level though the situation has been improved year by year.Specifically,their living conditions,economic conditions and psychological feelings have been improved to various extent.The welfare level of employment and protective security presents the downward trend year by year.Next,this dissertation uses the logit model combined with Shapley value method to decompose the return of rural migrant workers according to functional activities with the purpose of analyzing the key functional index that affects rural migrant worker’ return.Then,the data from rural fixed observation points of China is obtained to contrast the living conditions of rural migrant workers after the return.The study shows that rural migrant workers display a relatively strong will to return.In 2009,rural migrant workers who chose to return accounted for 36.31%,which fell slightly to 33.16%,but the proportion is still at a relatively high level.From the perspective of specific functional activity indicators,the city identification is the most critical factor that affects the return of rural migrant workers.The capability approach’s explanatory degree of return displays an overall increasing trend year by year.Therein,the interpretation rate in 2009 is 19.24% which significantly increases to 64.06% in 2012.It means that welfare plays an increasingly important role in the decision of return made by rural migrant workers.The comparison from rural fixed observation points shows that those rural families that return from Shanghai have better economic conditions and living conditions.Furthermore,this dissertation combines the factor model and FGT index to measure the welfare poverty of rural migrant workers.And on this basis,Shapley value decomposition is introduced to doubly decompose welfare poverty according to components,trying to discover the critical factors that affect welfare poverty,to reveal the components and types of welfare poverty,and to analyze the discrepancy existing among groups of rural migrant workers.The research reveals that the welfare poverty of rural migrant workers is relatively severe,22.24% of rural migrant workers are in the welfare poverty.In terms of welfare poverty’s component type,welfare loss is the most primary component of rural migrant workers’ welfare poverty with the contribution rate of 84.74%,but the contribution rate of welfare inequality is merely 15.26%.Income,sparetime life and satisfaction degree of city are three biggest index of welfare poverty contribution rate.Lastly,this dissertation uses propensity score match and average treatment effects to probe into the influence of residence card on rural migrant workers’ welfare.The research reveals that residence card can dramatically improve the overall welfare of rural migrant workers.In terms of specific functional dimension,residence card can improve rural migrant workers’ living condition,protective security and motional feelings the most.However,there is no obvious improvement on their employment and even it has negative impact on their economical conditions.According to results of propensity score match,residence card has limited influences on females,managers,unhealthy rural migrant workers and those of elementary and highly educated ones.The implications of this research are that we should place more emphasis on capability and development of rural migrant workers,rather than barely focus on the economic or material sides.The government should eliminate the discriminatory policies on rural migrant workers step by step,letting them fairly enjoy development bonus of cities.In addition,to promote rural migrant workers’ self-identity of city is the key measure to reduce the return of rural migrant workers.Therefore,in formulating and implementing the differentiation settling policy,the government should give more opportunities to rural migrant workers,so as to stimulate their upper movement to high social class,and to increase their social participation in the city life,eventually to promote their self-identity of city.Increasing the income of rural migrant workers is not the only way to reduce their welfare poverty,but developing their capability is the highest priority to resolve their welfare poverty so that it can bring their welfare level equal to that of citizen’s.The inflow city government must be determined and sincere to lower the limits of applying for the residence card,putting into practice and taking the responsibility to provide rural migrant workers with public services and social security.The innovation of this dissertation is mainly reflected in the following aspects.Firstly,innovation of research perspective.The current research of rural migrant workers’ welfare mainly focus on economic,material,existence,happiness or a certain dimension,unable to give a complete picture of rural migrant workers’ welfare problem.Breaking the limits of economic or material perspectives,this dissertation originates from capability approach which contains more information basis,studying a series of questions about rural migrant workers’ welfare including return,poverty and residence card system.Second,filling in the gap.In the welfare study of rural migrant workers based on capability theory,scholars have not yet reached a consensus on the selection of theoretical framework and function index,and there are short of a uniform measurement standard.This dissertation constructs a theoretical analytical framework of rural migrant workers’ welfare,and proposes a relatively systematic and comprehensive measurement system of capability index on this basis in order to complete the measurement of rural migrant workers’ welfare,and to fill in the gap of current literature.Thirdly,innovation of research method.This dissertation combines the factor model and Shapley value method in order to construct the welfare decomposing framework.Through MATLAB programming,this dissertation achieves the double decomposition of rural migrant workers’ welfare poverty according to functions and components,measures in details the contribution degree of each functional index,and further decomposes welfare poverty into loss and heterogeneity in order to unveil the structure and type of welfare poverty. |
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