Land Use Rights, Market Transitions, and Labor Policy Change in China (1980-4)

Yiu Por (Vincent) Chen ()

No 6521, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper provides a systematic analysis of the way shifts in property utilization rights in China induced another sequence of institutional changes that led to the rise of rural-urban labor migration from 1980 to 1984, a critical period in the country's market transition. I show that the 1980s' Household Responsibility System (HRS), which brought family farming back from the communal system, endowed rural households not only with land use rights, but also with de facto labor allocation rights. These shifts in property relations promoted a growth in agricultural market size as well as the emergence of intraprovincial non-hukou rural-urban migration, which may have made labor retention policies such as the small township strategy ineffective, and may have given the government an incentive to deregulate its subsequent labor market policy.

Keywords: rural-urban migration; labor mobility; undocumented labor; institutional change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J43 J61 R23 R52 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2012-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-his, nep-mig and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6521.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Land use rights, market transitions, and labour policy change in China (1980–84) (2012)
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:iza:izadps:dp6521

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().