Rural-Urban Migration and Market Integration /
We combine a new collection of microdata from China with a natural policy experiment to investigate the extent to which reductions in rural-urban migration barriers affect flows of trade and investments between cities and the countryside. We find that increases in worker eligibility for urban reside...
Gespeichert in:
- 1. Verfasser:
- Körperschaft:
- Weitere Verfasser:
- , ,
- Format:
- Elektronisch E-Book
- Sprache:
- Englisch
- Veröffentlicht:
-
Cambridge, Mass.
National Bureau of Economic Research
2025.
- Zusammenfassung:
-
We combine a new collection of microdata from China with a natural policy experiment to investigate the extent to which reductions in rural-urban migration barriers affect flows of trade and investments between cities and the countryside. We find that increases in worker eligibility for urban residence registration (Hukou) across origin-destination pairs increase rural-urban exports, imports, capital inflows and outflows, both in terms of bilateral transaction values and the number of unique buyer-seller matches. To quantify the implications at the regional level, we interpret these estimates through the lens of a spatial equilibrium model in which migrants can reduce buyer-seller matching frictions. We find that a 10% increase in a rural county's migration market access on average leads to a 1.5% increase in the county's trade market access and a 2% increase in investment market access. In the context of China's recent Hukou reforms, we find that these knock-on effects on market integration were on average larger among the urban destinations compared to the rural origins, reinforcing incentives for rural-urban migration.
- Umfang:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Anmerkungen:
- August 2025.
- Schlagworte: