Heterogeneous Impact of Social Integration on the Health of Rural-to-Urban Migrants in China

Haiyang Lu, Ivan T. Kandilov and Peng Nie
Additional contact information
Ivan T. Kandilov: Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 16, 1-14

Abstract: Background: While several studies have found that lower levels of social integration may lead to a deterioration in the health status of migrants, previous research on the nexus between social integration and health has generally ignored the potential endogeneity of social integration. This paper examines the heterogeneous impact of social integration on the health of rural-to-urban migrants in China by exploiting plausibly exogenous, long-term, geographic variation in dialectal diversity. Methods: Drawing on nationally representative data from the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey (n = 117,446), we first regressed self-reported health on social integration using ordinary least squares estimation and then used an ordered probit model as a robustness check. Additionally, to rule out the potential endogeneity of social integration, we relied mainly on an instrumental variable approach and used dialectal diversity as a source of exogenous variation for social integration. Results: We found that social integration has a significant positive impact on rural-to-urban migrants’ health. We also detected considerable heterogeneity in the effects of social integration across gender, generation, and wage levels: the health status of women, more recent generation migrants, and migrants with wages in the middle of wage distribution are more likely to be affected by social integration. Conclusions: We confirmed the beneficial impact of social integration on migrants’ health, which has some important policy implications. Successful migration policies should take the fundamental issue of migrants’ social integration into account.

Keywords: social integration; health; dialectal diversity; internal migration; China; heterogeneous effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/16/9999/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/16/9999/ (text/html)

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:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:16:p:9999-:d:887514

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().