Internal labour migration has become an important part of the process of China’s industrialization and urbanisation in the 2000s. Using micro data for the year 2007, this chapter attempts to contribute to a better understanding of the motives of and the constraints to labour mobility in China....

This paper investigates the impact of land tenure insecurity on the migration decisions of China's rural residents. A simple model first frames the relationship among these variables and the probability that a reallocation of land will occur in the following year. After first demonstrating that...

Like most other developing countries, China experiences huge migration outflows from rural areas. Their most striking characteristic is a high geographical and temporal mobility. Rural migrants keep going back and forth between origin villages and destination areas. In this paper, we show that...

This paper focuses on the determinants of self-employment among rural to urban migrants in China. Two self-selection mechanisms are analysed: the first relates to the manner in which migrants choose self-employment or paid work based on the potential gains from either type of employment; the...

This paper investigates how rural-urban income differentials interact with the risk coping motive to shape households' migration behavior. Using a model of migration behavior under agricultural income risk, our theoretical results suggest that while income differentials remain crucial in...

This paper investigates the impact of land tenure insecurity on the migration decisions of China's rural residents. A simple model first frames the relationship among these variables and the probability that a reallocation of land will occur in the following year. After first demonstrating that...

Land requisition has been an important process by which Chinese local governments promote urbanization and generate revenue. This study investigates the impacts of land requisition on farmers' decisions of labor allocation between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. We argue that,...

The majority of China’s roughly 145 million rural-urban migrants were born after 1980, making this population the “new generation” of internal migrant workers. Having been directly influenced by China’s rapid economic growth and recent socio-demographic policy changes, this cohort of...

We analyze two complementary household datasets from China's poor areas to examine whether the poor migrate and whether migration helps the poor. We find an inverted-U-shaped relationship between household endowments and the likelihood of migration. Over time, the poor are more likely to...

Using data from recent surveys of migrants and local residents in 10 cities in 2005, this paper examines how migration influences measurements of urban poverty and inequality in China, and also compares how other indicators of well-being differ for migrants and local residents. Contrary to...