Urban bias, migration control and rural land policy: the case of Hukou in China

Abdulaziz B Shifa and Wei Xiao

Journal of Economic Geography, 2023, vol. 23, issue 2, 251-274

Abstract: Urban-biased politics often drives distortionary policies in many countries. We develop a political economy model in which the government faces a trade-off between retaining urban support and expanding its industrial rent base. The model shows that while an increase in urbanization strengthens the government’s incentives to adopt rural land reform and to encourage rural–urban migration, an increase in urban productivity has the opposite effect. These effects are mediated by the income share of labor in the rural sector, the political power of urban residents and the labor elasticity of urban output. Using China’s context, we illustrate that the model’s predictions are consistent with the observed policies on land ownership and rural–urban migration.

Keywords: Urban bias; land policy; rural–urban migration; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H13 O53 P26 R1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeg/lbac008 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:jecgeo:v:23:y:2023:i:2:p:251-274.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Geography is currently edited by Jorge De la Roca, Stephen Gibbons, Simona Iammarino, Amanda Ross and James Faulconbridge

More articles in Journal of Economic Geography from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().