Abstract
Abstract This paper examines how left-behind children influence migration duration in China. We first present a simple illustrative model that incorporates economic and non-economic motives to migration duration. Using individual data from a survey carried out in Wuwei county (Anhui province) in 2008, we find that migrant parents of children in primary school tend to delay their return, a result we interpret as illustrating the need for migrant parents to accumulate money for their offspring’s education. In contrast, parental time appears substitutable by coresiding grandparents who contribute to delay the parents’ return, especially mothers, when they have children below the age of 12. JEL classification: J61, J13, C41, O53
Highlights
Economic development is often combined with the transfer of a large proportion of workers from the rural-based traditional agricultural sector to the urban industrial sector
There are genderbased differences regarding the migrant parent: sons in primary school are a strong motivation for a longer length of stay of their migrant father, whereas grandparents appear as potential substitutes for mothers in taking care of left-behind children
This paper contributes to the understanding of migration dynamics within China by exploring the determinants of the spell of rural-to-urban migration and by highlighting the cost of leaving behind children
Summary
Economic development is often combined with the transfer of a large proportion of workers from the rural-based traditional agricultural sector to the urban industrial sector. Because we are interested in school-aged or pre-school children in the home village, we assume that the child does not work in the second period Given these two assumptions, the proposed model captures the situation of a family unit composed of a worker engaged in migration (the parent migrant) and a left-behind child. Assuming no migrant parent location preference in her own consumption (aR = aM), the decision to return for an altruistic parent reduces to a comparison of the loss in utility due to lower income (and, possibly, a reduction in education opportunities) with the gain in utility thanks to a better-off child (through better quality day-to-day care, for instance). The empirical analysis presented below aims to estimate this reduced-form relationship by focusing on the migrants’ length of stay in cities
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