To leave or to stay: Digital economy development and migrant workers’ location

Lingzheng Yu, Jiannan Wang, Shiyan Lou and Xiahai Wei

Journal of Asian Economics, 2024, vol. 94, issue C

Abstract: The vigorous development of the digital economy will reshape labour demand, which in turn will affect the workplace choice of migrant workers and then their location. Taking the large-scale and highly-mobile immigrant workers in urban China as the research population, this paper conducted an empirical research on the impact of the digital economy on labour location using the data from the China Labour-force Dynamic Survey (2012–2016). Results show that the more developed a city’s digital economy is, the more immigrants the city can attract and absorb. Analysis of the impact channels shows that the attraction of the digital economy to immigrants stems mainly from entrepreneurial opportunity provision and skill utilization enhancement effects. There is individual heterogeneity in the impact of the digital economy, with low-skilled, rural, or high communication ability migrant workers likely to be positively impacted by the development of the urban digital economy. While local governments are committed to digital technology-driven economic transformation, they should nonetheless promote the training of workers in the new era to achieve a better match between digital development and labour market.

Keywords: Digital economy; Migrant worker; Labour location; Entrepreneurial opportunity Subject classification codes: J24; J61; O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1049007824000873
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:asieco:v:94:y:2024:i:c:s1049007824000873

DOI: 10.1016/j.asieco.2024.101792

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Asian Economics is currently edited by C. Wiemer

More articles in Journal of Asian Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().