Rural industrialization and internal migration in China

In order to avoid problems of overcrowding and urban unemployment that are associated with over-urbanization observed in other developing countries, since the late 1970s China has been actively pursuing a strategy of rural industrialization by encouraging the development of rural industries which provide employment opportunities for the surplus labor in agriculture. In this paper, we examine the impact of rural industrialization on migration using data from the 1990 China Population Census. We use robust estimation of logit models that not only capture the impact of rural industrialization on migration propensity but also take into account the nature of clustered data. The results suggest that rural industrialization does not have a systematic impact on the probability of migration (both intraprovincial and interprovincial).