Research On The Duality Of Local Governments’ Behavior In The Urbanization Of Migrant Workers

In 2014, China’s resident population urbanization rate reached 54.7% while household one is only about 37%. A large number of migrant workers being difficult to integrate into the urban cities and the lag in the process of citizenization lead to the remarkable gap of 17.7%. A new-type urbanization, proposed in the 18th CPC National Congress, focus on improving the quality, emphasizing the human-centric principle, and makes best efforts to reverse the situation that land urbanization goes faster than population urbanization. The most prominent problem in current population urbanization is citizenization of migrant workers and how to help them to realize and share the fruits of modern urban civilization with urban residents, also a prior work in the process of urbanization. In fact, the realization of citizenization of migrant workers is not a symbolic changing of HuKou but the actual sharing of public services and welfare system attached to the household registration system. And the local governments are the principal part to provide the public goods in today’s political centralization and fiscal decentralization system.In this paper, the principal part of institutional innovation consist of four parts which are central government, local governments, businesses and workers. And the process of their institutional changes are viewed as the citizenization of migrant workers. However, China’s government governance structure leads to a local governments guided situation, therefore, the behaviors of local governments in the process of urbanization of migrant workers are analyzed here.Firstly, macro-data shows the process of citizenization of migrant workers remaining stalled and microscopic case reflects the rights protection of migrant workers remaining serious deficiencies. Generally, the current situation of urbanization of migrant workers is not satisfying. In China, the behaviors of local governments determine the process of urbanization of migrant workers and some gradual reform policies are proposed by the central government. The survey shows the ambivalent feature of local governments’ behavior in the process of urbanization, taking supportive approaches to fully utilize migrant workers’ labor value as well as negatively supportive approaches to avoid spending on welfare burden, leads to the consequence of mentioned situation of urbanization.Secondly, the facts why the ambivalent feature of local governments’ behavior showed in the process of urbanization is theoretically analyzed from three points in this paper. Point one, the analysis of specific system to incentive or constraint the behaviors of local governments; Point two, the serious situation resulting from the interest pattern between local governments and migrant workers is analyzed via game theory; Point three, the principal-agent relationship between the central and local governments is analyzed via the optimal incentive model. And it is concluded that, in present, the certain ambivalent behaviors of local governments leading to the process of citizenization focusing on equalization of basic public services wouldn’t make a serious breakthrough.Finally, we can make countermeasures and proposals to local governments on shift from inactive to responsible action. Specifically, the transition to the role of local governments can be achieved by institutional arrangements via reforming or improving the incentive and constraint of local government behaviors.