Decisive Factor Analysis Of China's Rural Surplus Labor Mobility

In developing countries, the process of economic development is essentially the process of industrialization and urbanization, which entails surplus rural labor transferring to urban areas. Since E.G.Ravenstein published a paper on labor migration, people began to do research on the motives, rules and impact of the migration.The rural labor migration in China was not very active and steady from the very beginning, but gradually accelerated with the deepening of economic reform and opening up of the society. With the economic crisis, there is a tendency of "return". Therefore, facing with the upgrading of the economic structure and challenging of the present urban and rural dual social system, exploring the main determinants of labor mobility would have important practical significance, doing great help for the government to optimize labor migration and promote the healthy development of the economy.Different schools of labor migration theories have developed many mature models and theoretical explanation. From a practical point of view, many factors affect the labor movement, such as productivity distinction between traditional and non-traditional sectors, expected income differences between urban and rural areas, migration costs and returns, etc. In China, during a long time, labor mobility is strictly depressed by the dual household registration system, roles of the factors are also subject to certain distortion. But with the increasing openness and socio-economic levels, the importance of these factors will show up. Thus, more and more domestic and foreign scholars begin to study on whether various factors would affect the labor movement and to what extent if so.Many different social, economic and political factors will influence labor migration. Given the need of empirical research and based on previous study, this paper adopts the view of Todaro model, selecting two different provinces in the eastern and western part of China as analysis samples, and tries to figure out the impact of expected income differences on rural labor mobility.The first chapter is a general review of the foreign and domestic academic research in the field of labor migration, both theoretical and empirical, and a summary of shortcomings of various theories.Chapter two summarizes the historical and current situation of China's rural surplus labor force migration, emphasizing on the labor movement waves during different periods since 1978 and new problems emerging after the 2008 global financial crisis.Chapter three conducts an overview of the Todaro model, mainly about its proposition and modification, focusing on its further modification and applicability in China.Chapter four selects several major factors which have a substantial effect on the labor migration and conducts empirical research with latest data to test the previous argument.Chapter five consists of conclusions and policy recommendations.We can find from the study that what affects the labor force migration most is the expected income differences, although the roles of its decompositions are different. We are quite sure that policy makers could work in these aspects to eliminate the barriers to labor mobility. In addition, some other factors, such as the household registration system, land transfer mode, the development of international labor market, though not included in the prior empirical study due to the difficulty to be quantified, are important and helpful to solve the current labor migration problems.