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Land Ownership as an Urban Employment Disincentive for Rural Migrants in C hina
Author(s) -
Rao Can,
Yu Jingwen,
Zhu Hongfei
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the developing economies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.305
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1746-1049
pISSN - 0012-1533
DOI - 10.1111/deve.12073
Subject(s) - urbanization , incentive , china , work (physics) , business , population , commission , rural population , labour economics , compensation (psychology) , rural area , demographic economics , economics , economic growth , geography , market economy , finance , political science , engineering , mechanical engineering , psychology , demography , archaeology , sociology , psychoanalysis , law
When landowning rural migrants in urban areas in C hina become unemployed, they retain the option to return home to agricultural work. As a result, the opportunity cost of the loss of employment for these migrants declines. In addition, the potential wealth arising from compensation for expropriated rural land increases significantly with ongoing urbanization in C hina. This weakens the incentive for landowning rural migrants to work as hard in urban employment as they might otherwise. In this paper, we employ the Floating Population Dynamic Monitoring Survey for B eijing, S hanghai, and G uangzhou in 2012, as surveyed by the Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission to assess the employment disincentives induced by rural land ownership. We find that compared with landless rural migrants, landowning rural migrants generally have less job stability and lower salaries.