The Rural-to-Urban Migration In China And Welfare Effect Analysis

Since the mid-1980s,the acceleration of urbanization and industrialization and the rapid development of services in China lead to a high demand for labor,meanwhile,there is a large amount of surplus work force in rural area,together with other various factors,contributed to a huge number of rural residents migrated to urban from rural areas.The rural-to-urban migration of rural residents,on the one hand realizes the utilization of rural surplus labor force,contributed to the development of urbanization and industrialization and vitalizes the services;on the other hand,help relieve the "large population and limited farm land" problem in rural area and improve the efficiency of agricultural production and management benefit of farmers.In 2014,the values-added of primary industry just shared 9.2 percent of gross domestic product(GDP)in China,but employees in the primary industry accounted for as high as 29.5 percent of total labor force.From this perspective,the non-agricultural transfer of rural labor force is far from complete.National Plan on New Urbanization(2014-2020)points that,there are a large number of residents in rural areas with shortage of agricultural water and soil resources,scale management of land is difficult to implement,the traditional mode of production is difficult to change,this is the root of the problem of "agriculture,rural areas and farmers".In order to realize the coordinated development of the industrialization,urbanization and agricultural modernization,China still need to push forward the rural-to-migration and promote the process of citizenization migrant workers.However,according to some macro-level statistical data,the total growth of rural-to-urban migrant works shows a rapid decline trend,and some micro-level survey reported that many rural residents show a low migration will.In the theories of migration,economic factors are the intrinsic motive of pushing rural residents to migrate to urban areas,and the income growth effect of rural-to-urban migration has been confirmed by previous researches.At present,China’s income gap between urban and rural areas is still at a high level and the wage of migrants shows a rising trend,it seems a paradox with the reality that many rural residents showed a low migration will.In fact,as the improvement of rural infrastructure and the rising of living standard of rural residents,and other factors such as public service,social security are attached great importance by migrants,it is insufficient to investigate migration just from economic perspective.A more comprehensive perspective is to study the effect of rural-to-urban migration on subjective well-being(SWB)of migrants.SWB is regarded as a composite indicator of the living standard,and some researchers agreed that SWB can reasonably measure the level of welfare.For most people,the pursuit of happiness is one of the main goals in life.Thus,it’s meaningful to investigate how rural-to-urban migration influences the SWB of migrants and the mechanisms of the migration on SWB.On the one hand,for the migrants,the higher the happiness means they are more well in the city and after controlling other factors,the SWB has a significant impact on the migrants will of settling in the city.On the other hand,if rural-to-urban migration results in the enhancement of SWB,it’s a positive incentive to the rural-to-urban migration of rural residents.Otherwise,it’s a negative incentive to the migration will of rural residentsThe purpose of this paper is to assess rural-to-urban migration’s effect on the welfare(income and SWB)of migrants from the causal inference perspective.In the absence of a panel tracing migrants before and after migration,based on the microscopic theory of population migration and the Chinese General Social Survey data in 2010 and 2013,we use the Propensity Score Matching(PSM)to create a two-period synthetic panel,and then using Difference-in-Difference(DID)to access the causal effect of migration on the migrants.Further,we conduct the heterogeneity analysis of the causal effect.In addition,this article also analyzes the mechanisms of how migration affects the SWB of migrants.Finally,we conclude the paper and give relevant policy recommendations.The empirical result shows that,although the rural-to-urban migration leads to an increase in income,it has a negative effect on the SWB of migrants.This is the one of the main reasons of the low migration will of rural residents.The heterogeneity analysis of the causal effects shows that,there is a great difference between different migrants,and shows a high income and low SWB accompanied characteristics.In addition,the analysis of mechanism of migration on the subjective well-being showed that the rising income of migrants at the cost of other factors which have a positive effect of subjective well-being(self-reported social strata,social fairness,social activities and leisure),and the effect of income on the migrants’ SWB is greater than on the rural residents’ SWB.According to the empirical result,this paper argues that,by enhancing the SWB of rural-to-urban migrants and creating the attraction of cities from the SWB perspective,and then increase rural residents’ expectation of SWB’s increase after migrated to city,this are feasible ideas to improve the rural-to-urban migration will and orderly promote urbanization process.