Elsevier

World Development

Volume 38, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 113-124
World Development

Great Expectations? The Subjective Well-being of Rural–Urban Migrants in China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2009.03.002Get rights and content

Summary

This paper is among the first to link the literatures on migration and on subjective well-being in developing countries. It poses the question: why do rural–urban migrant households settled in urban China have an average happiness score lower than rural households? Three basic hypotheses are examined: migrants had false expectations about their future urban conditions, or about their future urban aspirations, or about their future selves. Estimated happiness functions and decomposition analyses, based on a 2002 national household survey, indicate that certain features of migrant conditions make for unhappiness, and that their high aspirations in relation to achievement, influenced by their new reference groups, also make for unhappiness. Although the possibility of selection bias among migrants cannot be ruled out, it is apparently difficult for migrants to form unbiased expectations about life in a new and different world.

Section snippets

INTRODUCTION

This paper contributes to the voluminous literature on rural–urban migration in developing countries. It does so from a new angle—by examining the subjective well-being of respondents living in migrant households in China. It raises an interesting puzzle. The normal assumption of migration theory is that rural people migrate in order to raise their utility, at least in the long run. Yet our sample of migrants has a mean happiness score of 2.3, well below the mean score of the rural sample (2.7)

MODELS OF MIGRATION

The economic literature on internal migration in developing countries is surveyed in Lucas (1997): there is emphasis on utility as providing the motive for migration but there is no mention of measured happiness. The original probabilistic model of rural–urban migration (Todaro, 1967) has spawned a plethora of models, but almost all of them have the following features in common. First, the model is based on the assumption either of utility maximization or of income maximization where income

THE BACKGROUND AND THE DATA

The phenomenon of rural–urban migration in China has been different from that in most other poor countries (Cai et al., 2008, Knight and Song). During the period of central planning the movement of people, and especially movement from the communes to the cities, was strictly controlled and restricted. Even after the commencement of economic reform in 1978, migration was very limited although temporary migration was permitted when urban demand for labor exceeded the resident supply. The system

HYPOTHESES

There are several possible explanations for our puzzle, giving rise to hypotheses that we wish to test, or at least to explore. Our first hypothesis is that migrants, when they decided to migrate from the village, had excessively high expectations of the conditions that they would experience in the city. We shall look for evidence that this might be the case by considering the characteristics of their urban life that reduce their welfare.

Second, the puzzle might be solved by recourse to the

THE DETERMINANTS OF HAPPINESS

We estimate happiness functions in order to discover the determinants of happiness among rural–urban migrants. This enables us to test Hypotheses 1, 2, and 3. We proceed in stages: first, we estimate OLS estimates of the happiness score, both with a basic specification and with a full set of explanatory variables; second, we confine the sample to employed migrants, as this enables us to introduce a series of work-related variables; and third, we estimate the same equations with the income

ARE MIGRANTS SELF-SELECTED?

Hypothesis 4 is that migrants have lower mean happiness than rural people because they are self-selected. Thus, their lower happiness might be the result of differences in characteristics. A different testing methodology is required. We wish to compare the migrants with both rural and urban residents, employing the standard Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique, based on identical happiness regression equations for the groups being compared. The choice of explanatory variables used is governed

CONCLUSION

This research is among the first to link the literatures on rural–urban migration and on subjective well-being in developing countries. Indirectly, Stark, 1991, Stark and Taylor, 1991 introduced relative deprivation based on income rank within the origin village as a determinant of internal migration, and adduced supporting evidence for Mexico. Fafchamps and Shilpi (2008) found that the perceived adequacy of consumption of rural–urban migrants in Nepal was inversely related to mean consumption

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to three referees for helpful comments, to the Nuffield Foundation for supporting the research from its Small Grants Scheme, and to the Global Poverty Research Programme of the UK ESRC for a grant which helped to fund the collection of data on subjective well-being in the survey on which the research is based.

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