Abstract
Using data from the 1997–2009 waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we examine the ‘healthy migrant hypothesis’ in a setting where internal migrants face significant barriers to movement. Going beyond much of the existing literature in the Chinese context, we use an appropriate comparison between migrants and non-migrants at origin, using detailed health measures, and data spanning a wider geographic and temporal extent than had been previously considered. Consistent with research from both international migration contexts and other internal migration settings, we find that migrants are positively selected on the basis of health, although the relationship between health and migration diminishes across time. The strongest evidence for health selection comes from a subjective self-reported health measure, although we also find evidence for selection against those experiencing acute health conditions. We speculate that the across-time differentiation may be caused by the rapid social, economic and policy changes in China’s economic reform era. Thus, we suggest that migration scholars should consider the changing macro context when theorizing about selection factors.
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Notes
International migration also started to boom in the 1980s, but the size of these migration flows are not comparable to that of internal migration. In this study we focus mainly on internal migration in China.
The Household Responsibility System is a land reform launched in the early 1980s in China, which divided collectivized land into portions and allocated them to households. Farmers are required to turn over a portion of their yield to the government, but may keep the rest.
The result was probably found because the authors were comparing migrants with the urban working class, instead of the general population in Shanghai. They speculate that it is because migrants compare their situation with fellow homeowners’ who are left behind instead of local residents in Shanghai.
More information about the China Health and Nutrition Survey can be found on the project’s web page at the following URL: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/china.
One problem with this approach is that we miss migrations beginning and ending in return to origin (i.e., circular migrations) between panels. For example, if an individual who was interviewed in 1997 migrated in 1998, returned in 1999, and was re-interviewed in 2000, such an individual would be defined as a non-migrant.
Most of those going to school, although they do not reside with the rest of the household, typically still live within the same administrative boundary. Thus, we consider them non-migrants.
We speculate that some of the drop in migration prevalence in 2004 could have been due to the success of the New Socialism Countryside Program of 2003, which improved the living standards of rural Chinese.
Divorce, separation, and death of a spouse are relatively uncommon in this sample, so this measure is largely measuring the difference between being never-married and currently married.
A suburban village is an area on the periphery of an urban region. It is still considered 'rural' and villagers still hold rural household identities.
Although variables have different proportions of missing values across waves, marital status was consistently the highest among these, followed by household variables, education and occupation, and a small proportion of health measures.
Unfortunately, we could not link the records of some individuals across panels due to what we term ‘follow-up attrition.’ It is likely that in these cases the whole household moving out of the study area (or otherwise refused to participate in the study), and hence no one was present to provide information on the whereabouts of individuals who were interviewed in a prior wave. Since we cannot ascertain the location of these individuals, we are unable to classify their migration status, and we have no choice but to remove them from the analysis.
See Baulch and Agnes (2011) for an implementation of this procedure in Stata.
The predicted probability for the reference category ‘Poor/fair health in 1997,’ is not easily visible from the figure, but its value is equal to ~0.10, which is the lowest value of those we calculated.
We had to remove cases from the Northeast region (N = 337) in 2004 because no one in the sample from that region migrated in that year.
For example, many of the occupation effects became significant in the pooled model, and the rural variable became significant in 2004 and 2006. There were also some more significant regional differences in 1997.
Perhaps one of the most notorious examples of stress involved in factory work is the case of the Foxconn Technology Company, which operates an electronic manufacturing facility in Shenzhen. As a consequence of long working hours, crowded dormitories, strict enforcement of discipline on assembly lines, and heavy fines for even minor work infractions, there was a spate of suicides among factory workers (Barboza 2010). Indeed, large suicide nets were installed to prevent workers from jumping out of windows and falling to their deaths.
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Tong, Y., Piotrowski, M. Migration and Health Selectivity in the Context of Internal Migration in China, 1997–2009. Popul Res Policy Rev 31, 497–543 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-012-9240-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-012-9240-y