Rural-urban migrants' remittances and wage inequality: Evidence from China

Yunyun Wu and Xiaochun Li
Additional contact information
Yunyun Wu: Department of Economics, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

Agricultural Economics, 2020, vol. 66, issue 3, 129-139

Abstract: There is a link between rural-urban remittances and wage inequality. However, the existing literature sheds little light on this topic. In this study, we establish a three-sector general equilibrium model to investigate the effects of rural-urban migrants' remittances on wage inequality. Further, we use Chinese macroeconomic data to calibrate the parameters and conduct analysis with numerical simulation. We find that, when rural-urban migrants raise their remittance rate, wage inequality between skilled labour and the urban formal sector remains unchanged in the sector-specific capital case but narrows in the sector-mobile capital case. Moreover, in the sector-specific case, skilled and unskilled wage inequalities, wSY and wSZ, decrease at the same rate as the urban-rural wage inequalities, wXY and wXZ, respectively. In the mobile case, however, the former declines faster than the latter.

Keywords: endogenous remittance; externality; less-developed country; rural-urban migration; wage inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://agricecon.agriculturejournals.cz/doi/10.17221/53/2019-AGRICECON.html (text/html)
http://agricecon.agriculturejournals.cz/doi/10.17221/53/2019-AGRICECON.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

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:caa:jnlage:v:66:y:2020:i:3:id:53-2019-agricecon

DOI: 10.17221/53/2019-AGRICECON

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Ing. Zdeňka Náglová, Ph.D.

More articles in Agricultural Economics from Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ivo Andrle ().