Economic Analysis Of Education Of Children Of Rural-Urban Migrations In China

The scale of rural-urban migrations has expanded rapidly since 1978 in China. Meanwhile, the problem of education of their children has loomed. Many migrant children can not enroll in schools in cities. The majority of study about this problem focus on researching the situations, descriptive analysis and policy study. So far, there is no formal analysis of education of children of rural-urban migrations in the view of economics in China.Enlightened by Todaro migration model, I bring forward a migration-education model in the thesis, and study the factors of deciding the distribution of children of migrations among rural schools, urban schools and urban streets in the framework of the model. The basic idea of the model is that the decision about where the migrations let their children enroll in schools is based on the balance of the gap between rural education and urban education and the possibility of getting urban education. The key assumption is what the public schools in cities charge migrant children is below the level that can clear the education market. After studying the equilibrium and comparative statics of the model, I expand the model so that it can comprise some important character in the real world—compulsory education law, the system of Hukou, differences of cities and schools for migrant children. I get many forecasts in analyzing the model, some of them is different with the rule of thumb. On account of the strict limit of available data, I only test some forecasts by case analysis that prove to support the model. Because I can not hold other things constant, the support is still very inadequate.The policy meaning of the thesis is that if we only bring down the threshold of the public schools to migrant children without other action, though those lucky children who enroll in public schools can get more rent, because this can attract many children left behind to come into city, there will be more migrant children who can not enroll in schools in city. For the same reason, only expanding the scale of urban education to the extent that can contain all of the existing drop-outs can not resolve the problem. Only when the scale of urban education is expanded to such extent that can contain not only all of the existing drop-outs but all children left behind, the problem can be completely resolved. Now because of the change of the age distribution of population, the students enrollment in primary schools and secondary schools decreases rapidly. This is a good thing for the solution of the problem. Because the better the city authorities provide education for migrant children, the higher the drop-out rate is in the city, the cities authorities have the motive to rise the threshold of the public schools to migrant children. So it is required that the central government and public opinion compel the cities authorities to take necessary action.