Migration impact on China’s population dividing line driven by hybrid features: perspectives of climate change and wage gap

Abstract

The development of China’s population distribution boundary (Hu Line) in the future will have mixed driving characteristics: (1) driven by potential agricultural production in the long term; (2) driven by the wage gap between the eastern and the western provinces in the short term. At the same time, China’s unique pattern of migrant workers has increased the complexity of the issue of population migration between the Hu Line. This paper establishes a population support model based on the Potential Agricultural Production and a multi-regional Computable general equilibrium model considering a transfer mechanism of remittance. Results show that the population proportion caused by climate change in the provinces west of the Hu Line will increase in the long term, but the stability of the Hu Line has not been broken down. In the short term, as the wage-driven migration of western labor force expands, the country’s total economy shows a growing trend, and the wage gap between regions gradually narrows with the expansion of the migration scale. When the migration rate of the western labor force is 30%, the per capita GDP gap between the eastern and western regions of the Hu Line is the minimum, and when the rate is 10%, the per capita income gap between the eastern and western regions is the smallest. Though the rural migrant workers from the western province can improve the living standards of families in the western regions, it has little impact on the national and regional economy overall.