Education, Migration and Source Community Incomes in Rural China

Peter Karpestam

No 2011:2, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Residents in rural China doubt the benefits from education, yet there is empirical evidence supporting positive effects in urban and rural areas. This paper investigates whether education affects a variety of income attainment indicators for households in rural China, using a household survey from the provinces of Hebei and Liaoning. The analysis estimates education effects for household residents, but also for temporary migrants (rural-urban migrants) and children who have moved permanently (rural-rural migrants). This can help to answer a set of three related questions: 1) Does household welfare in rural China depend on education? 2) Is the effect of education contingent on the decision to migrate? and 3) Does education have dissimilar effect for rural-urban and rural-rural migrants? The results support that education has positive income effects and that migration yields no additional payoffs. However, there is no evidence that households benefit from higher education if migration is only temporary. Altogether, this signals positive payoffs of educational expenses to rural households but households which consider sending a migrant into the urban labor force are better off if the more educated stay at home.

Keywords: East Asia; China; Education; Migration; Remittances; Non-Farm Incomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 F24 I20 J60 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2011-01-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna, nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-lab, nep-mig, nep-tra and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://project.nek.lu.se/publications/workpap/papers/WP11_2.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to project.nek.lu.se:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2011_002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics School of Economics and Management, Box 7080, S-22007 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iker Arregui Alegria ().