Table 1 - uploaded by Björn Anders Gustafsson
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In China hukou (the household registration system) imposes barriers on permanent migration from rural to urban areas. Using large surveys for 2002, we find that permanent migrants number about 100 million persons and constitute approximately 20 percent of all urban residents. Receiving a long education, being a cadre or becoming an officer in the P...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... this we derive probably the first estimate of the size of the permanent rural to urban migration population in China -110 million persons. This means a magnitude similar to the temporary migration population in 2004, which is counted as 120 million (State Council, 2006, p 4). 6 If we define the "true" urban population as the sum of those who are Table 1 shows the number of permanent migrants in our sample by gender and age. The proportion of males among the permanent migrants is higher than the corresponding proportion among urban born residents; this result probably signals larger access to career routes, as females seldom join the PLA, for example. ...
Context 2
... Table 10 abut here/ The estimated rates of return to education presented in Table 10 are somewhat higher for females than for males but do not differ between permanent migrants and other urban residents. For example, the rate of return for one year of schooling is 7 percent for males and 9 percent for females. ...
Context 3
... Table 10 abut here/ The estimated rates of return to education presented in Table 10 are somewhat higher for females than for males but do not differ between permanent migrants and other urban residents. For example, the rate of return for one year of schooling is 7 percent for males and 9 percent for females. ...
Context 4
... We define white-collar to mean occupations coded as professional, director, director of department, clerical/ office staff. Table 11 shows that not less than 82 percent of those who had received a hukou through career routes were occupied in white-collar occupations, to be compared with only 29 percent among those who had received a hukou through other channels. ...
Context 5
... Table 11 about here/ Permanent migrants who have received a hukou through career routes are more likely to be male, members of the Communist Party, have a longer education and have lived in urban China longer than those who have received hukou through informal routes. There is also a considerable difference in earnings across the two categories, as mean income of migrants who received a hukou through informal routes on average earn 26 percent less than those who The earnings differential can be decomposed as four parts: ...
Citations
... However, under the restriction of the Hukou system, migrant workers cannot integrate into the urban environment and cannot enjoy public welfare and social security benefits [11]. If these rural laborers want to attain equal income and welfare to their urban counterparts, they have to overcome the restrictions of the Hukou system and become permanent urban migrants; however, the odds of this are slim [12]. With the gradual development of the rural labor market, the opportunity for rural labor to shape the labor market has also expanded. ...
... The economic status of permanent migrants is related to their age at conversion to urban Hukou; the younger the age, the higher the income. Meanwhile, many migrants who obtained urban Hukou with non-employment often were unable to adapt to the urban lifestyle [12,[24][25][26]. ...
According to previous studies, the Chinese revised Hukou system has not been proven to be effective in the short-term movement of the rural labor force or in controlling urban populations. In this study, we address and analyze the self-selection problem from the perspective of inflows of short-term migration from the rural labor force and the endogeneity problem in the adoption of the revised Hukou system, based on the data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). The study shows that the revised Hukou system adopted by Chinese local governments was significantly efficient and harmed the short-term migration decisions of the rural labor force.
... The experience of China is instructive. There, the similar household registration system (hukou) imposes barriers on permanent migration from rural areas to urban areas (Deng and Gustafsson 2006). Rural migrant workers face more difficulties searching for jobs in urban areas in China, and are less likely to switch industries, compared to urban residents. ...
... Other possible breakdowns are possible. Deng and Gustafsson (2006) compare formal with informal jobs (which our sectoral breakdown implicitly does), while Cheng et al. (2013) distinguish between jobs in competitive and noncompetitive sectors. Our data do not allow us break down jobs along these last lines. ...
... We define migrants as those who do not have a ho khau that permits them officially to live in the city, but we need a better understanding of how people born outside Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City sometimes manage to obtain a ho khau, for instance, by pursuing higher education in city-based universities. Deng and Gustafsson (2006) have explored this issue for China, but absent data on where our survey respondents were born, we are unable to determine the process by which migrants obtain a ho khau. It would also be helpful to explore where in the income distribution the effects of potential discrimination are strongest, for instance, is it poorly-educated or well-educated migrants who face the strongest headwinds? ...
In 2009, migrant workers in the two major cities of Vietnam, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, earned 42% less per hour than did non-migrant (“resident”) workers. We seek to explain this gap using data from a carefully-designed urban poverty survey undertaken in 2009 by the General Statistics Office. We use the method proposed by Brown, Moon, and Zoloth, which first explains how workers sort into different sectors, and then examines wage differentials using a Blinder-Oaxaca style decomposition. About half of the wage gap may be explained by endowments. The system of residential permits (ho khau) may contribute to the difficulties faced by migrants. Our results are broadly similar to, although more stable and plausible than, those found for the major cities in China.
... The institutional framework in which the Chinese urban labour market operates has been covered extensively, with particular attention being placed on the residential registration (hukou) system see (Cai 2000;Deng and Gustafsson 2006;Zhao 2005). This system was originally designed in the 1950s to control migration within the country by registering household members in designated rural or urban locations. ...
We use a nationally representative survey to investigate the incidence of discrimination against internal migrant workers in urban China, considering both migrants from rural areas (rural migrants) and those from other urban areas (urban migrants). We find that both rural and urban migrants are discriminated out of jobs with formal labour contracts. Results also suggest that urban migrants are compensated for working in the informal sector by earning higher wages. There is evidence however of wage discrimination against rural hukou status. A semi-parametric method suggests a larger discrimination against migrants in the upper half of the wage distribution. Discrimination against migrants seems not to decrease as their duration of stay in the urban labour market increases.
JEL codes
J7; J51; O15; N35
... Going to college has been a major channel that increases the probability of a favourable Hukou status. Other channels that increase this probability include serving in the military, being recruited by SOEs or the government(Wu and Treiman, 2004;Fan, 2008), rural residents' lands being occupied by urban construction projects(Wong and Huen, 1998), and rural households purchasing urban housing(Deng and Gustafsson, 2006). 11 likely to secure local citizenship when they migrate, but still many cannot change their registration location, especially when they move to large cities.Using a random sample of the 2005 one percent population survey, we show two pieces of evidence, which suggest that the labour market for skilled workers is far from efficient. ...
. We document and discuss the implications of a sharp increase in the regional dispersion of skill premia in China in recent years. This has previously been little noted or discussed. We use three urban household surveys for 1995, 2002, and 2007 and estimate skill premia at provincial and city levels. Results show an increase in the skill premium across all regions between 1995 and 2002, but only coastal regions show significant increases in skill premia between 2002 and 2007. For 2007, coastal regions also have much higher within-region wage inequality, and this contributes more to overall urban wage inequality than within-region inequality of non-coastal regions. Using a fixed effects model at city level, we find that ownership restructuring is a significant factor in driving up skill premia during the first period (1995 to 2002), and that the ongoing process of China's integration into the global economy plays a significant and regionally concentrated role in the second period (2002 to 2007). Finally, we suggest that the Hukou registration system may prevent skilled labour from moving to high skill premium regions and retard mobility-induced reductions in inequality. This effect may also retard even higher growth.
... Several articles provide an overview of the institutional background of China's ruralurban migration, with particular emphasis on the hukou registration system; among them Cai (2000), Zhao (2005), Deng and Gustafsson (2006) and de la Rupelle (2007). Despite the several reforms to the system since the 1970s, deliberate discrimination of migrants in cities remained legal until very recently, in order to reduce competition of rural migrants in urban centres (Cai, 2000). ...
The rapid and massive increase of rural-to-urban migration in China has drawn attention to the welfare of migrant workers, particularly to their working conditions and pay. This paper uses data from a random draw of the 2005 Chinese national census survey to investigate discrimination in urban labour markets against rural migrants, by comparing their earnings and the sector (formal vs. informal) they work in with those of urban residents and urban migrants. Exploiting differences in their status in the Chinese residential registration system (hukou) we find no earnings discrimination against rural migrants compared with urban residents, contrary to popular belief. In contrast, we find that urban migrants in fact gain a large wage premium by migrating. However, both rural and urban migrants are found to be discriminated out of the formal sector, working in informal jobs and lacking adequate social protection.
... Not including better access to social services and higher pensions for migrants and their families, Deng and Gustafsson compute that the economic value of an urban hukou is twice as high as its price. That permanent migrants who receive a hukou after the age of 25 never catch up with their urbanborn counterparts provides further evidence about the selective impact of hukou on migration (Deng and Gustafsson 2006). ...
... 4 Over several decades, this group has increased to 110 million by 2004 and is the largest source of increase in the urban population: Deng and Gustafsson (2006). 5 Argumentation on wage development and labor shortages follows Schucher and Kruger (2010). ...
... Several articles give excellent introduction and analysis on the institutional background of China's rural-urban migration, in particular the Hukou system (see for example Zhao (2005), Deng and Gustafsson (2006), Wang and Cai (2006)). Basically, rural migrants can be divided into two groups, those obtained an urban hukou and those did not. ...
... 4 Moreover, once they are registered as urban residents, they are no longer rural residents, their land in sending regions will no longer belong to them, and officially they are no longer villagers and have no voting right any more on village affairs. Both casual observation and academic research (Deng and Gustafsson, 2006 for example) indicate that rural migrants who successfully obtain an urban hukou are well integrated in urban society. On the other hand, many rural migrants retain their rural hukou, they still have land and have political right in their village affairs. ...
... The others, who successfully obtained the urban hukou, are largely neglected (Deng and Gustafsson (2006) is among a few exceptions). We'll see that these two groups of migrants are different in many aspects from individual characteristics to labor market outcomes. ...
As massive rural residents leave their home countryside for better employment, migration has profound effects on income distributions such as rural-urban income gap and inequalities within rural or urban areas. The nature of the effects depends crucially on who are migrating and their migrating patterns. In this paper, we emphasize two facts. First, rural residents are not homogeneous, they self-select to migrate or not. Second, there are significant differences between migrants who successfully transformed their hukou status (permanent migrants) and those did not (temporary migrants). Using three coordinated CHIP data sets in 2002, we find that permanent migrants are positively selected from rural population especially in terms of education. As permanent migration takes more mass from the upper half of rural income density, both rural income level and inequalities decrease, the urban-rural income ratio increases at the same time. On the contrary, the selection effect of temporary migrants is almost negligible. It does not have obvious effect on rural income level and inequalities.
... The third group is "acquired" urban residents who had changed their hukou status from rural to urban at some point in their life (nongzhuanfei). As Deng and Gustafsson (2006) pointed out, the "acquired" urban residents can be regarded as "permanent migrants" who have distinctive socioeconomic characteristics. We find that among urban residents with hukou, it is mainly those "acquired" urban residents who are unhappy with hukou-related inequality. ...
This paper presents the impact of income inequality on the subjective wellbeing of three different social groups in urban China. We classify urban social groups according to their hukou status: rural migrants, gbornh urban residents, and gacquiredh urban residents who had changed their hukou identity from rural to urban. We focus on how the income disparity between migrants and urban residents affects individual happiness. The main results are as follows. People feel unhappy if inequality is related to their hukou identity, irrespective of whether they are urban residents with or without hukou. However, when identity-related inequality and other individual- and city-level characteristics are controlled, inequality measured by city-level Gini increases happiness. We also find that among urban residents who own hukou, mostly the gacquiredh urban residents are unhappy with hukou-related inequality. This implies that identity is formed by both policy and personal experience. gBornh urban residents have lower happiness scores when they are old. Communist Party members strongly dislike the identity-related inequality.
... Such over-representation is understandable, as one route for receiving an urban hukou is via a long education and another by becoming a cadre. (See for example Deng and Gustafsson, 2006) ...
While some workers in China attain senior professional level and senior cadre level status (Chuzhang and above), others attain middle rank including middle rank of professional and cadre (Kezhang). This aspect of the Chinese labour force has attracted surprisingly little attention in the literature, a fact which this paper aims to rectify. We define various segments of the urban population in work-active ages and use data from the Chinese Income Project (CHIP) covering eastern, central and western China for 1995 and 2002. For 2002, persons of high rank make up 3% and persons of middle rank make up 14% of persons in work-active ages. Factors that affect a person's likelihood of having high or middle rank are investigated by estimating a multinomial probit model. We find that education, age and gender strongly affect the probability of being employed as a worker of high rank. There is relatively little income inequality among workers of high rank as well as among workers of middle rank. Mean income and household wealth per capita of highly-ranked workers developed more favorably than for other segments of the population studied, and personal income is more polarized by segment in 2002 than in 1995. Workers of high rank, and to a lesser degree, workers of middle rank, are among the winners in economic terms while the increasingly large category of non-workers is the losers. Rates of return to education have increased but income function analysis indicates that this provides only a partial explanation for the increased favorable income situation for workers of high and middle ranks.
... The third group is "acquired" urban residents who had a chance to change their hukou status from rural to urban at a certain point in their life (nongzhuanfei). As Deng and Gustafsson (2006) pointed out, the "acquired" urban residents can be regarded as "permanent migrants" who have distinctive socioeconomic characteristics. ...
China is not merely growing at double the rate of the European countries during the Industrial Revolution, it is also urbanising at double the speed. Using a unique dataset of rural-to-urban migrants in 15 major Chinese cities, we give preliminary answers to some of the most pressing policy questions: how many migrants are there and what are their attributes? Are they dissatisfied or are their kids doing worse than the kids of others? Are they discriminated on the labour market and, if so, what are the mechanisms via which this discrimination works and where are the market forces to undo the discrimination?
