Chinese Labor Determinants Of Inter-provincial Migration And International Comparison

The issue on Labor migration has long been the main focus of each developing country included China which encounters millions-scale migration across the country. This thesis aims to research into the intrinsic motivation on the inter-provincial migration in China from both micro-factor and macro-level perspective. Using the latest data from sample survey data of 1% of the population in 2005 and empirical research of migrants in 2009, a clearly trend is shown in labor flow directing towards east region, covering the three Megacities in China. From micro level, due to the unique system constrains (HUKOU system), the migrants in China face a different choice differing from international ones. From macro-level, migrants tend to move to the neighboring export-oriented provinces which contain better education facilities probably due to their(or their offspring) urgent need to overcome the institutional obstacle (Hukou) in China. Pushing effect is much easier found in Western-China rather than Central-China region. We also found different characteristics regarding to different regions. Comparing with the experience from international labor migration, migration flows respond to economic differences across the countries and that many other non-economic measures like linguistic closeness, cultural distance, costs of migration as well as network effect. The mechanism, which is maximizing individual's utility, for the migration between internal migration in China and international one to the OECD countries is similar. Nevertheless the behavior behind both tends to be quite different. The most probably reason lies to the institutional factors, especially the household registration system (hukou), imposing unbreakable impedance to the migrants.