 Health Status and Earnings of Migrant Workers from Rural ChinaLijian Qin, Chien-Ping Chen, Xun Liu, Chenggang Wang and Zhongyi Jiang China & World Economy, 2015, vol. 23, issue 2, 84-99 Abstract: The migration of rural laborers into cities for employment has been one of the main driving forces of China's economic growth over the past three decades. Based on a dataset collected by the Ministry of Agriculture of China from 2003 to 2007, this paper examines the impact of health on the earnings of migrant workers engaging in physically-intensive work requiring good health. Our findings indicate that a poor health status not only weakens the incentive of rural laborers to participate in the migrant labor force but also significantly reduces their earnings. A migrant worker in poor health only earns 67 percent of what a healthy worker makes. Among all the human capital characteristics and family economic factors, health status is the most influential on earnings for less educated workers. Labor productivity has a greater impact on earnings than the annual number of days that a person works. Ongoing health-care reforms aimed at the improvement of the health-care services available to rural laborers are urged to help reduce poverty in rural China. Date: 2015 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:chinae:v:23:y:2015:i:2:p:84-99 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article China & World Economy is currently edited by Yongding Yu More articles in China & World Economy from Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Contact information at EDIRC. |
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