脱贫农户的社会流动与城乡公共服务

Social Mobility of the Former Poor Households and the Public Services in both Rural and Urban Areas

本文借助调查数据和案例分析,考察脱贫农户和迁移劳动者的社会流动以及他们对公共服务的需求。主要发现:第一,在新冠肺炎疫情大流行期间,脱贫农户依然通过家庭内部分工支持青壮劳力转向城市就业和落户。留守村庄的人口严重老龄化,然而老年长期照护筹资和服务均不足。第二,农民家庭普遍实现了代际教育流动。部分乡-城迁移劳动者进入劳动力市场前,利用助学贷款完成了中等专业教育和高等教育。第三,在获得正规就业岗位的受访者及随迁家庭当中,大约4/5跨越了中等收入群体的最低门槛,将近1/4的家庭利用银行贷款在城市购买住房。第四,迁移劳动者失业期间极少得到城市救助或受惠于失业保险。随迁家庭也难获得适合其收入水平的托幼服务。因此,有必要实行普惠制的老年和幼儿照护补贴,以促进城乡社会保障及公共服务体系的融合。

The rapid industrialization and urbanization beginning at mid-1990s in China brought about a yearly tide of the immense rural-urban labor migration. However, up to now the migrants with the rural residential registration have not yet obtained the equal rights in their employed cities as the dwellers with the local urban residential registration. The demographic impacts of such circumstances can be seen from the phenomena that over a hundred million structurally incomplete families emerged in both the rural and urban areas. The family members left behind in the villages and the migrant workers have suffered enormous pain from the long-term spatial separation of their families.The problems stated above should be tackled with fundamental policy measures to eliminate the rural-urban societal separation as well as to make up the existing institutional deficiencies in the socioeconomic transition. This paper intends to answer the following research questions. First, how the rural households and the migrant workers adjust their living and development strategies under the disaster of Covid-19 pandemic? Second, what institutional barriers impede them to implement their strategies? Where and why the obstacles come from? How those constraints could be removed? The data and information used in this paper are mainly collected from the two sources. One is a small-sized sample survey that our research team conducted on rural households and migrant workers in six provinces during 2020—2021. Another is the time series data sets created by the nationwide annual survey system under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Based on statistics and case studies this paper mainly illustrates the social mobility trends of the rural former poor households and the rural-urban migrants as well as their needs for social protection and public services. First, during the period of Covid-19 pandemic the households have kept their intra-household labor division in order to enable the young and middle-aged members to seek jobs and eventually settle down in the cities. The inhabitants left behind in the villages are seriously aging. However, neither financing nor service provision for the elderly care is sufficient. Second, farmers’ families have generally realized the intergenerational education mobilities. By using the students’ loans, a part of the rural-urban migrants completed occupational or tertiary education prior to entering the labor market. Third, about 80 percent of the interviewed migrants working in the formal sector have earned as much as to bring their migrated families to go beyond the lowest threshold of the mid-income group, while less than 25 percent of the interviewed purchased an apartment in the cities with housing loans. Fourth, in the case of losing jobs the migrants have rarely received urban relief or unemployment benefits. It is also difficult for the migrated families to find affordable child care services in the cities. Therefore, it is necessary for the central government to grant the nationwide child and elderly care allowances with a universal coverage and promote further the integration of the rural-urban social protection and public service systems. It is considered that the paper added a value to the existing literature in three aspects. First, it explores how the migrants and those left behind in the rural households have made the best use of market mechanisms to achieve an inter-generational upward mobility in education, income and housing assets. Second, it reveals that the social exclusion hidden in the urban public policies reproduce the family separation of the rural migrants. Third, the tentative policy suggestions with references to the experiences of the developed countries are put forward for developing a rural-urban integrated social protection system.