Analysis On Interprovincial Migration In China From An Environmental Perspective

Since reforming and opening up in 1978,Chinese economy has been growing at a high speed.While it brought us great wealth,serious environmental pollution questions in some areas have been continuously upgraded due to extensive mode of production.The scale of migrants has increased which is caused by environmental issues,such as frequent haze,water pollution,natural resources exhaustion and so on.This phenomenon should not only attract the attention of the government,but also should be concerned by the academic community.The study on Interprovincial Migration in China from an Environmental Point not only expands the perspective of population migration theory and empirical application,but also is in line with the theme and developing direction of building a harmonious and beautiful society.In order to analyze whether environmental factors play a significant role in population migration,this paper firstly defines the concept of population migration to eliminate the interference of our special household registration policy and classify the environmental migration,pointing out that our object is the environmental pollution migrants.Then we introduce the research progress of environmental migrations at home and abroad and the mechanism of environmental factors on population migrations from the angle of demand.After that,we prominently conduct an empirical analysis based on provincial panel data in china over the period 2005 to 2016.As for variable selection,we employ factor analysis to build a comprehensive index which can reflect the environmental status,and then use linear logarithmic model SYS-GMM to explore the effects of environment pollution on interprovincial migration.The conclusion is that environmental pollution does have a negative impact on population migration to some extent,which is more obvious with the economic development,but it has not become one of the dominant factors of population migration.And we explore this issue further by regarding economic development level and industrial structure as threshold variables to estimate the above effects.By analysis,from the angle of industrial structure,When the share of the second and the third industry output is smaller,the negative impact of environmental pollution is not significant;When the share accounts for relatively large,environmental pollution could have a significant expulsion effect on migration due to environmental pollution greatly deepened;As the proportion of the third industry continues to increase and the second industry reduces correspondingly,the quality of the environment get improved and expulsion effect of environmental pollution is weakened.Due to different industrial structure,the impact of environmental pollution on population migration generally presents the "inverted U" trend.As the economy develops,the negative impact of environmental pollution on migration increases firstly and then decreases,which also presents a "inverted U" trend.This is related to the dynamic adjustment in the process of urban development between regions.In the early stage of economic development,the provinces pursue the rapid economic growth and the population is attracted by higher income level and more employment opportunities.The expulsion effect of the environment is weak at this stage.With the continuous improvement of the economic situation,the population also pays more attention to the quality of life and the environment,so serious environmental pollution will aggravate the emigration of the population.After the economy has reached a higher level,the government brings pollution under rigorous control and most households can use technology or expand spending to reduce environmental negative effect.The expulsion effect of environmental pollution decreases.It is of great significance to hold the rule for the socialist modernization,industrial-structure adjustment,migration-structure improvement and pollution prevention.