Center on Pacific Economies Research Grant Recipient

Chinese Rural-to-Urban Migration

Lei Meng, Ph.D. Candidate

Lei Meng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Joint Program of Economics and International Affairs at UCSD. Her research relates to applied economics in general and the Chinese economy in particular. Meng graduated from Cornell University in 2002.

I am now in my fifth year of graduate study. My dissertation research revolves around the topic of rural-to-urban migration in China. My Chinese background has of course made me more interested in understanding economic development in China; however, the Chinese rural-to-urban migration has enough economic importance in its own right to attract research effort.

Chinese rural-to-urban migration is one of the most important economic phenomena in the past twenty years and one of the greatest movements of people in modern history. According to estimates by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the number of rural-to-urban migrants increased from 2 million in the mid-1980s to about 70 million by 1999. This number climbed to 88 million in 2001, 94 million in 2002, and over 100 million in 2005. Another estimated 200 million rural residents are anticipated to migrate to urban areas and engage in urban jobs by 2020. This labor mobility and reallocation have been estimated by researchers to have contributed to at least 16 to 20 percent of China’s GDP growth since the initiation of reform. The continued successful movement of Chinese rural people out of the countryside will have great consequences for the Chinese economy, the Pacific Rim economy, and the economy of the world in our increasingly globalized society.

Despite the extensive research that has been done on this topic, the existing economic literature is limited by both data scarcity and inaccessibility. Through the collection of primary data, my dissertation makes an endeavor to address the identification problems that often exist in related researches that use only cross-sectional data. In particular, I am studying how household wealth, fluctuating village-level terms of trade status, and changes in China’s agricultural policies affect the individual migration decisions of rural residents in hinterland China.

In January 2006, working with Professor Guang Li from Wuhan University and with funding from the Academy of Development of Wuhan University, I conducted a rural household labor mobility survey involving 1,200 rural households in Zhijiang city, Hubei province, during the Chinese New Year when most migrants return to their rural homes. From this survey, we built a pseudo-panel by soliciting retrospective information at both the individual and household level. In January 2007, the Center on Pacific Economies provided the much-needed funding for me to carry out a follow-up survey of the same 1,200 households during the 2007 Chinese New Year. This follow-up survey helped me constitute a genuine and extremely valuable longitudinal dataset that is conducive to examining the dynamic properties of migration decisions, studying the extent of measurement error, and obtaining important indicators not collected in the original survey.

I am currently working on my job market paper based on this longitudinal dataset. I expect to graduate by June 2008.