Consumption and social integration: Empirical evidence for Chinese migrant workers

Xiaobing Huang and Xiaolian Liu

No 2016-11, Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: This paper investigates the nexus between consumption and social integration of Chinese migrant workers using survey data with 869 samples from four Chinese provinces. The study suggests the following results: (1) Migrant workers are less integrated in terms of psychological integration and cultural integration, but they are strongly motivated to integrate into host societies; (2) An increase in consumption is associated with an increase in the social integration of migrant workers. This effect is stronger for new-generation migrant workers and weaker for high-income migrant workers; (3) Entertainment consumption plays the most important role in the social integration of migrant workers, whereas the effect of housing consumption on social integration is found to be negative; (4) Among all types of consumption behaviors, rational consumption is beneficial to the social integration of migrant workers, whereas impulsive consumption is harmful. The effects of economic consumption and conspicuous consumption are not significant.

Keywords: consumption; consumption behavior; migrant workers; social integration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 F22 J15 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-mig, nep-tra and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/discussionpapers/2016-11
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/129439/1/851728243.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:ifwedp:201611

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().