Abstract
For areas facing challenges associated with migration, information about the number of migrants and their demographic characteristics is needed to formulate regional development planning. This study analyzed the trends and characteristics of inter-provincial migrants in provinces in mainland China and related economic factors using panel regression models. The results showed that the number of inter-provincial migrants had increased in provincial municipalities, as had the proportions of female and elderly migrants. A higher annual net migration rate was associated with slower growth rate of real gross domestic product (RGDP) per capita and faster growth rates of the tertiary and secondary industry GDPs. The higher proportion of female migrants was related to the faster growth rate of the tertiary industry GDP and the lower proportion of the secondary industry in GDP. The proportion of youth migrants was positively related to educational investment, while the proportion of elderly migrants was positively related to financial expenditure per capita on culture and recreation. These empirical results were robust across different estimation methods, except the result about the proportion of elderly migrants. These findings further reveal the association between inter-provincial migration and economy and provide policy reference for the management of migrants.
Highlights
As the world has entered “the age of migration” [1], the number of migrants reached 1 billion in 2015, including 740 million internal migrants worldwide [2]
The results of the panel unit root tests showed that seven variables, namely, annual net migration rate (ANM), sex ratio (SR), growth rate of real gross domestic product (RGDP) per capita (GRR), growth rate of tertiary industry GDP (GRT), growth rate of secondary industry GDP (GRS), urbanization rate (UR), and proportion of secondary industry in GDP (PSI) were stationary at the 5% significance level, while the other three variables, namely, youth dependency ratio (YDR), educational investment (EI), and the proportion of tertiary industry in GDP (PTI), were stationary in the first difference
Our study is the first to present findings suggesting that the number and gender–age structure of inter-provincial migrants in China are closely related to economic indicators
Summary
As the world has entered “the age of migration” [1], the number of migrants reached 1 billion in 2015, including 740 million internal migrants worldwide [2]. In the United States, a large number of people migrated to the rust belt of the Midwest before the 1970s [3]; in Japan, the population mainly migrated to the Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya areas, and these three areas accounted for 51.9% of the total population in Japan in 2016 [4]; in India, there were approximately 42 million inter-state migrants by 2011 [5]. As the country hosting the most internal migrants in the world, China’s mass internal migration began in the late 1980s [6]. By the end of 2017, there were 245 million internal migrants in China [7]. There were 97 million inter-provincial migrants, mainly laborers [8], doubling in number since 2000 [9]
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