Abstract
Education inequality between the rural and urban areas of the People's Republic of China (PRC)—a potential bottleneck for human capital accumulation—has long been of interest to researchers and policymakers. This paper uses data from the China Family Panel Survey (CFPS) and the Rural–Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) survey to compare the education performance of rural children, children of rural-to-urban migrants, and urban children over the period 2009–2010. Results show that education performance of rural children and migrants’ children is significantly lower than that of their urban counterparts even after accounting for differences in personal attributes such as nutrition and parenting style. This provides useful insights for policymaking to reduce rural–urban education inequality and assist human capital accumulation in the PRC.
Highlights
Over the past 3 decades, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has experienced dramatic economic growth
The above findings suggest the following: (i) there exists a substantial disparity in education outcomes of rural and urban children even after controlling for many attributes, (ii) there is no significant difference in education outcomes between rural children who stay in rural areas and those who migrate with parents and receive their education in urban areas, (iii) migrating children generally have significantly poorer education performance than their urban counterparts they are educated in the same cities, and (iv) there is evidence to show that the education disparity between rural and urban children tends to be widened for younger age cohorts
This paper uses China Family Panel Survey (CFPS) and Rural–Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) survey data to examine the differences in education performance of children between rural and urban areas of the PRC
Summary
Over the past 3 decades, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has experienced dramatic economic growth. Based on the 2005 1% Population Sampling Survey (conducted by National Bureau of Statistics, NBS for short), the number of years of schooling of the country’s labor force was 8.6 years on average, while only 25% of the labor force (aged between 15 and 65) had an education level of junior high school or above This implies that there is a large gap in human capital endowment between the PRC and Asian countries that have escaped the middle-income trap such as Japan and the Republic of Korea (Rozelle 2013). With the increased migration of rural labor into cities in recent years, education inequality between rural and urban areas of the PRC has started to negatively affect human capital accumulation in the urban labor market. This section briefly summarizes education inequality between rural and urban areas in the country and the education performance of rural-to-urban migrants’ children
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