Economic Assimilation Of The Rural-urban Migrants

In order to promote rural-urban migrants' economic assimilation,the reforms of Hukou System has offered an opportunity for those migrants who have ability to work and live stably in the city to change their hukou status and have the same rights as the local urban residents since 2014.Generally,the local goverments take the example of an urban local resident whose work is formal employment to screen out qualified migrants.Meanwhile,the informal employment has become a major channel for rural-urban migrants' employment.The contradiction between the good intention of this policy and the fact that millions of rural-urban migrants are in the informal employment leads the thesis to ask and answer:what is the role of the informal employment in the process of rural-urban economic assimilation?The economic assimilation of the rural-urban migrant is not only a result,but also a process,which is the dynamic interaction between migrants and non-migrants,it's cumulative process.The thesis focuses on the procedural meaning of the economic assimilation.Similarly,the economic assimilation is the base of the urban assimilation,the employment,income and occupational development has a fundamental and decisive significance to realize economic integration.Therefore,the thesis mainly examines the role of the informal employment in those three aspects of the assimilation.Different from Neoclassical Economics treating the rational economic man who is out of the social networks as "undersocialized"and Structural Function theory emphasizing the constrains of the structural factors as "over-socialized",the Embeddedness theory suggests the economic behavior is affected by the embeddedness factors,not only emphasizing the impacts of those factors on individual actions but also individual autonomy and initiative in economic activities.Based on the the Social Embeddedness theory,the thesis constructs an analysis framework of rural-urban assimilation from political embeddedness,cognitive embeddedness,network embeddedness.This framework also provides the theoretical basement for the later empirical analysis to control relative embeddedness factors so as to test the role of the informal employment in the the process of rural-urban migrants'assimilation.Besides,the thesis takes the local urban residents as reference in the above empirical analysis,because the assimilation is also a relative concept.The thesis constructs the framework of rural-urban migrants' assimilation based on the Social Embeddedness Theory.By using CLDS2016,the thesis analyses the impact of the formal and informal employment on the migmats' economic assimilation under procedural meaning.The thesis will provide empirical results for policy makers to promote the"human-centered" urbanization.There are seven parts in this thesis.The main research contents and the related conlusions are as follows:Patr I:Construct the framework of rural-urban migrants' assimilationThis part mainly discusses the meaning of the economis assimilation as a process;then discusses the necessity based on the perspective of social embeddedness;answer why the thesis categorizes formal and informal employment;answer why takes the local urban residents as reference in the above empirical analysis;last but not lest,based on the Social Embeddedness theory to analyses the mechanisms of the migrants' economic assimilation and puts forward the hypothesis to be tested.Patr II:The Choice of the informal employment and formal employment for rural-urban migrantsIn order to overcome the data clustering problem,this part uses Generalized Hierarchical Linear Model.This part found that the impact of hukou system pushes the rural-urabn migrants into the informal employment comparing the local urban residents.Besides,human capital have a significant positive impact on migrants' possiblilty in formal employment;the larger the network scale,the higher the probability employed in informal self employment,and the higher the network heterogeneity,the lower the probability employed in informal employment for migrants.Part III:Work income of rural-urban migrants under different types of employment.Based on the perspective of social embeddedness,controlling the social embeddedness factors that may affect the rural-urban migrants' work income,this part examines the impact of formal and informal employment on the work income of rural-urban migrants.This part firstly uses the OLS estimation to analyses the impact of differernt form employments on all sample and migrants' work income.Then using the BGF method to overcome self-selection bias problem in the estimation of the income equation.The results of BGF estimation show that there is only a positive employment selection effect for workers who earn income from formal employment.At last,this part uses PSM estimation methods to estimate migrants' the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated of informal employment.Both the results of BGF estimation and PSM estimation concludes that engaging in informal employment is not always worse than formal employment,especially informal self-employment.Part ?:Career development of rural-urban migrants under different types of employment.This part descripts the distribution of objective occupational strata under different employment forms of rural-urban migrants.This part uses work identy as the measure of migrants'self-assessment of career development.Based on the perspective of social embeddedness,controlling the social embeddedness factors that may affect the rural-urban migrants' work identy,taking local citizens as a reference,to examine the impact of formal and informal employment on the work identy of rural-urban migrants.Considering there may be endogenous relationship between income and job identification,and self-selection bias problem in the estimation of the work identy equation,this part uses eoprobit model to test the possible endogenity.It found that the eoprobit model is suitable for estimating the work identy of different types of employment for rural-urban migrants.The results of the research by the eoprobit method show that the treatment effect of the agricultural transfer population engaged in informal employment is significantly positive,while the employment of informal self-employment has a negative impact on job recognition but is not significant.Based on the conclusion of the full text,this thesis proposes the following policy implications:(1)Informal employment has not caused distortions in the urban labor market.The government should categorize and guide informal employment to formal employment rather than suppress it.(2)The government should remove the obstacles of household registration and its derivative system.(3)The government should provide policy convenience for the transformation of informal employees with stable sources of income into local citizens and help them integrate into the cities where they flow.(4)Pay attention to the investment of human capital in the transfer of agriculture and the shaping of modern urban norms.