An Empirical Analysis Of The Causes Of Inter-provincial Urban-rural Migration In China

This paper focuses on the determinants of population migration under the background of rapid urbanization.The existence of the floating population has an important role in promoting urbanization,stimulating social development and economic growth.However,due to the large number of the floating population,and they have the characteristic of strong mobility,it leads to ineffective management of these floating population.Thus,the analysis of the cause of population migration has a profound significance for maintaining the social stability,promoting the economic growth,and providing effective public service for the floating population.This paper uses the fifth and the sixth population census data and studies the determinants of inter-provincial population migration.Applying the gravity model and the push-pull theory to pairwise data from 31 mainland provinces and 930 samples,we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the factors affecting the inter-provincial migration.In particular we focus on four migration modes:rural-to-urban,rural-to-rural,urban-to-urban,and urban-to-rural.Not surprisingly,rural to urban is still the dominant mode of migration.Our empirical results show that economic factors,demographic factors,geographic factors are the common determining factors that influence inter-provincial migration and inter-provincial urban-rural migration.The common feature means that the number of migration is positively correlated to the economic and demographic factors,and negatively correlated to the distance between two provinces.In the four migration modes,the special feature is that the population push effect of the sending province is the largest in the rural-to-urban migration mode,and the population pull effect of receiving province is the largest in the urban-to-urban migration mode.Moreover,the elasticity of migration with respect to distance is the highest in the rural-to-rural migration mode,and the education gap is significantly and positively correlated with migration except for the rural-to-rural mode.At the same time,in the inter-provincial migration,we find that the higher the ratio of secondary GDP and tertiary GDP,the more attractive for people's migration.