Abstract
The location choice and livelihoods of rural-urban migrants are critical to the sustainable development of cities. By using data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) in 2017, this paper extant the Rosen–Roback’s model by adding factors of urban social network and air pollution to the function of the individual utility of migrants. Both the Probit Model and IV estimates imply evidence of an inverse U-shaped pattern of city size and migrants’ permanent settlement in urban China. This view proves that Chinese migrants like to settle permanently in large cities, but not mega-cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai. The internal mechanism is explained by the agglomeration economies and the crowing effect brought by city size. In mega-cities, the attractiveness of the city caused by wage premium cannot offset the combined repulsive force caused by the high housing price, bad urban social network, air pollution, and health deterioration. It is worth noting that air pollution has a significant negative impact on the settlement intention of migrants, such as health conditions and precipitation. Besides, there is heterogeneity among high-skilled migrants and low-skilled migrants in different city sizes. Our findings enhance the understanding of “Escape from megacities” in China and have implications for the reform of the housing security system and the exploration of the urbanization path.
Highlights
The issues related to the location choice and livelihoods of rural-urban migrants are critical to the sustainable development of cities [1,2,3,4]
This paper expanded the Rosen–Roback model, and include the social relationship network and air pollution closely related to the city size into the model, which is more in line with the welfare needs of migrants; second, in addition to the spillover effect of wages, this paper finds that city size brings the spillover effect of social capital to the migrants, that is, the interaction term between the social network of local people and city size is significantly positive, which reveals that the promotion effect of local social network on settlement intention will be significantly strengthened with the city size
Results from the descriptive statistical results show that the longer the time of migration duration, the higher the wage level, and the closer the communication with local registered residents, the more conducive it is for migrants to settle permanently in the city
Summary
The issues related to the location choice and livelihoods of rural-urban migrants are critical to the sustainable development of cities [1,2,3,4]. As the crucial element of urban settlement associated with hukou, housing remains difficult to attain for Chinese migrants, making them hard to settle permanently in large cities [14,15]. In China, due to the high burden of housing prices, the crowding effect is greater than the agglomeration economics in mega-cities, resulting in a decline in the attraction of cities to migrants, especially the highly skilled migrants [30,31]. The limitation of the classical economic theory is that it cannot explain the agglomeration effect brought by large cities to migrants. Based on the previous studies, this paper makes conceptual and empirical contributions to the understanding of migrants’ urbanization in different cities. The permanent settlement of China’s floating population, both rental cost and house prices will have a significant inhibitory effect.
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