Separation And Consumption Choices In Rural Migrate Workers’ Family

Family is a main unit in consumer market, its structure affect the decision-makingof household consumption. Migrate workers from Chinese rural areas, who are alwaysin separated families, have to face with the consumption choices both inter-temporaland cross-regional, which forms a unique strategy to allocate families’ income and havedrawn a lot of attention for its impacts on outflow areas and inflow areas from economic,political and cultural perspectives.The classical theory cannot account for those unique allocation strategy until thepatterns of family migration are considered. To discuss the consumption choice of ruralmigrant workers’ families, this paper advocates a dynamic perspective of family lifecycle, establishes a structural analysis of expenditure, saving and remittance and tries tounderstand the motivation behind those behaviors.Based on the perspectives above and the data in the monitoring survey about ruralmigrant workers in six cities held by China’s National Population and Family PlanningCommission, this paper examines the influence of separation on intentions andtendencies of expenditure, saving and remittance across family life cycle by theconstruction of OLS,LOGIT and TOBIT model. The study shows that, expendituretendencies of rural migrant works’ families are lower than both local urban families andlocal rural families, which also differs between generations. Workers of the newgeneration especially those who are single and go out alone tend to consume more andsave less in their working cities, while workers of the old generation are on the contrary.The influence of separation on household consumption remarks along all periods infamily life cycle. In the cases when young workers separate from parents, marriedworkers separate from spouse and parents separate from children in all ages,expenditure and remittance are more than those migrate together. As for workers of thenew generation, families those migrate together has higher attention in saving becauseof their motivation for future consumption in working cities. Differently, the separatedold-generation workers’ families save more mainly for their future consumption inhometown.From the perspective of structural analysis, the target of saving relates to familysize and back-to-home desire, agrees with that of remittance in old-generation families, which is to prevent possible risks of families’ future in hometown under motivationsboth altruistic and hoggish. However, the target of saving relates to stay-in-city desireand social security, agrees with that of expenditure in new-generation families, whichsuggests that new-generation workers’ families save to prevent possible risks offamilies’ future life in cities where they are working and co-insurance should be addedto their motivation of remittance.