What Drives Migrants Back to Set up Firms?Return-home Entrepreneurial Intention of Rural Migrant Workers in China

The extant literature on international immigrants has discussed migrants’entrepreneurial activities in the context of Western countries but has paid little attention to return-home entrepreneurial intention(RHEI).Rural migrant workers(RMWs)in China,who used to promote rural development by remittances and were characterized by similarities with early international migrants,have gradually returned to their hometowns to initiate entrepreneurial activities.Based on the structured questionnaire conducted in 2015 and 2020in Anhui Province,China,this article combines the concept of mixed embeddedness with the idea of double-layered embeddedness and analyzes the impacts of the social,economic and institutional context in RMWs’hometowns and migration destinations on RMWs’RHEI by using binary logistic regression.The article shows that the social,economic,and institutional environments of RMWs’hometowns and migration destinations have effects on their RHEI.The embeddedness in the economic and informal institutional context in RMWs’RHEI is even more important than personal characteristics.Compared with migration destinations,RMWs’hometowns exert a more influential effect on their RHEI.However,that does not mean that the role of migration destinations can be undervalued.Actually,the better the social,economic,and institutional environments of migration destinations RMWs moved into is,the higher entrepreneurial intention they will have after returning to their hometowns.The article proposes a modified framework in combination of mixed embeddedness with double-layer embeddedness and proves that it is suitable for analyzing RMWs’RHEI.The framework has important implications for strengthening China’s RMWs to return home to start their own businesses.

Problems of Rural Migrant Workers and Policies in the New Period of Urbanization

The huge migration of rural workers has new characteristics such as the bad order, high degree of concentration, low level of collective action, marginality in social status, unfair treatment, difficult integration of the new generation, and the new return trend of rural migrants, which causes ‘urban diseases’ in China. Countermeasures should be taken to develop medium-sized and small cities, integrate the labor market of the city and countryside, provide necessary public services, social security and vocational training, guide the rural migrant workers to return rationally, and help the new generation live in harmony with urban residents.

Wage Levels of Rural Migrant Workers in China during 1979-2010： Estimates and Trends

Studies on long-term wage levels of rural migrant workers are rarely found in relevant literature. On the basis of systematic collection of statistical data, this paper gives a quantitative estimation of the wage level of rural migrant workers in China and its evolution following pro market reforms since 1978. Results indicate that over the past 30 years, the nominal monetary wage of migrant workers maintained a 10% average annual increase. Real wage levels adjusted by the consumer price index （CPI） experienced three stages of evolution： initially, migrant workers earned a higher average monetary salary than formal employees, whereas this situation reversed in later stages.

Analysis on the Causes of the Plight of Chinese Rural Migrant Workers＇ Endowment Insurance

At present, Chinese society is from traditional society to modern society in transition to accelerate, in the social, political, and economic structure, great changes have taken place; due to strong liquidity, migrant workers＇ groups in social security, are still in the stage of development, and there are still a lot of problems, especially the problem of endowment insurance. Although local governments develop the old-age insurance of migrant workers with their own characteristics, and have their respective advantages, but the effect is not ideal, as follows： ＂one low and one high＂, namely the migrant workers＇ participation rate was low and the insurance of migrant workers was ＂high rate of surrender＂. The reason is both within the Chinese social transformation factors, and external economic globalization competition; both obiectively, government policy implementation is not in place, and subjectively, migrant workers lack insured willing.

A discourse on creating and rendering educational and cultural enrichment services to rural migrant workers by public libraries

As far as China's enormous success in her economic reforms and development is concerned,Chinese rural migrant workers indeed have had their biggest share of contributions.Yet ironically in return,they have only received a disproportionate meager share of benefit rewards.These people represent a huge economically deprived group at the bottom of the social totem pole in China's metropolises.On the whole as a social group,their educational attainment is relatively low as compared to their average urban coworkers.As such being the case,their rights to access some of the cost-free cultural and educational enrichment programs in the society are limited and not always assured.Nevertheless and in general speaking,they manifest a strong and consistent desire to acquire all sorts of new and practical knowledge by means of accessing the resources and facilities of their local public libraries.It is suggested in this paper that public libraries are in a good position to give strong support to the central government's strategic planning for the development of a public culture service systema).In implementing such a government initiative with an unswerving purpose of advancing social justice and equality,public libraries should strife to provide as many as possible their library services at no cost to the public,especially to those socially deprived rural migrant workers.

Young Women Rural Migrant Workers in China’s West: Benefits of Schooling?

This paper explores the association of rural schooling with empowerment of female rural migrant workers in remote Western China.It asks what school-related intrinsic and instrumental capabilities enhanced their urban lives and their role as“drivers for development”in urbanizing China.The analysis of a long-term observational study of the females of one cluster of villages shows that recently-arrived(2015)young rural new-migrant workers manifested enhanced capabilities associated with their schooling in four dimensions of social freedoms:protective security against early arranged marriage,enhanced occupational opportunity,constructive social arrangements founded in rural identity,and cognitive and aspirational capabilities.Lower educational attainment and achievement are associated with fewer and weaker empowerment capabilities across all dimensions.Political empowerment capabilities in the sense of civil rights and entitlements have no foundation in earlier education and are lacking in their urban lives.However,a sense of“voice”is beginning to take hold among young rural migrant women.Taking a female-centric capability perspective uncovers beneficial aspects of internal migration,contributing to a more holistically theorized understanding of associated social changes.

An Empirical Analysis of Employment Stability and the Wage Gap of Rural Migrants in China Based on Quantile Regression

Under the background of accelerated integrated urban-rural development, this paper offers an analysis on the short-term employment of rural migrants in China and resulting wage gap between long-term and short-term rural migrants. On the basis of correcting for sample selection problems arising from labor market participation and short-term employment, rural migrants＇ wage function is estimated using quantile regression method, and wage gap between long-term and short-term rural migrants is decomposed using MM method. Our empirical results suggest that those with a higher level of education, training experience and local employment recommended by family relations or in formal labor market are more likely to secure long-term labor contract,＂ region and education have significant contributions to the wage of rural migrants,＂ rural migrants of both long- and short-term contract types have great gaps at the bottom of salary distribution; and there exists a sticky floor effect in wage difference of rural migrants. These results have important policy implications in enhancing employment stability of rural migrants, improving income distribution equity, speeding up the process of urbanization, and balancing regional development.

Study on the Rual Migrant Workers＇ Willingness to Have Urban Hukou and the Choice of Urbanization Path of China in Recent Years

Based on the empirically analysis of the data from a nationwide survey in 2010 in China, the study found. （1） The overwhelming majority of rural migrant workers in China were not willing to convert their rural household registration （nongye hukou） to an urban or non-rural registration Orei nong hukou）. If they were required to return the rural land contract rights as precondition, only lOper cent were willing to be urban citizens. （2） For the small proportion of migrant workers who were willing to convert their rural household registration to urban household registration, ＇obtaining access to better education and more opportunities for the continuation of education for their children＇ is the major incentive. （3） The primary reason for retaining a rural hukou, on the other hand, is to keep their rural contract land. （4） Finally, there is no significant difference between the rural migrant workers who were born before 1980 and those after 1980, in term of the attitude toward converting rural hukou to urban hukou. The policy recommendations drew from the findings are as follows： 1） In order to promote the urbanization process, the government should choose the path of ＇urbanization based on the long term residence in the towns and cities＇ instead of the path of ＂urbanization based on household registration ＇. 2） The rural migrant workers should be converted into urban citizens without being forced to give up their contact land. 3） The government should give equal weight in policy making to the migrant workers born before 1980 and those born after 1980. Therefore, the policy emphasis of deepening the urbanization of China should focus on the ＇equalization of the resource allocation of the public services and social welfare＂ while the characteristics of the separation of the household registration system should not be strengthened any longer.

The process and approach for the“citizenization”of Chinese rural migrant populations

China has a large rural migrant population,the country’s urbanization rate is low,and the cost of urbanization is high.These factors make the promotion of urbanization in China a long,arduous,and expensive task.By identifying and defining key elements of China’s urbanization transformation,this paper calculates the degree of China’s current transformation and proposes an approach based on systemic data to facilitate the continued process of transforming rural populations into citizens with full urban residential rights,herein referred to as“citizenization.”This paper finds that only about 40%of rural migrants had transformed into urban residents in 2011,and this share remained stagnant in 2012.Meanwhile,according to the sixth demographic census,the incomplete urbanization rate-calculated based on the difference between the share of the registered non-agriculture population as a percentage of the total population and the share of permanent urban residents-reached 23 percentage points.This thesis argues that it is necessary to advance the transformation process in a steady,stage-by-stage manner,including by carrying out multi-pronged efforts in various fields at various levels,and establishing a diversified cost-sharing mechanism,so as to achieve higher-quality,rational urbanization in China.