AsianScientist (Mar. 19, 2014) – Although brain drain of educated workers is still felt most severely in China’s central and western provinces, a study shows that low-educated migrant workers increasingly find jobs in their home provinces because of changing economic and government policy.
Ye Liu and his colleagues of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong and The University of Leeds in the United Kingdom carried out a systematic analysis of migration trends in China over the past 25 years. They found that China’s unprecedented surge of internal migration since the early 1980s is the result of unbalanced regional economic development and relaxed migration controls.
In the process, 163.4 million migrant workers have moved away from the less-developed interior, mostly to China’s coastal regions. Another 240 million migrants are estimated to become city dwellers by 2025. This could increase the urban population to nearly one billion people.
The spatial patterns of age, and education-specific migration mirror the geography of different forms of industries in China. For instance, knowledge-based and advanced service industries that attract educated migrants are highly concentrated in a few large coastal cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Labor-intensive industries favoring young and low-educated migrant workers are spread across the whole coastal region, where most provinces have become major recipients of less-educated migrants.
However, as a consequence of preferential policies and increasing state investment in industrialization, some interior provinces have recently undergone higher economic growth rates than most coastal provinces. The researchers believe that coastal areas will gradually lose their comparative advantages in developing labor-intensive industries due to the rising labor costs, the evaluation of China’s currency and the depletion of land resources.
The authors conclude, “Our findings suggest that massive eastward migration induced by the unbalanced development strategies and the relaxed migration controls still persisted in the first decade of the 21st century, and that the state’s recent efforts to alleviate regional inequalities have not resulted in the achievement of equilibrium in China’s internal migration system.”
Nevertheless, preferential policies and increasing state investment has led to higher economic growth rates in the interior provinces in recent years.
“While the coastal areas have made every endeavor to upgrade their industrial structures and develop knowledge-based economies, many interior areas have undergone a tide of industrialization and received many labor-intensive industries that transferred from coastal regions,” say the authors.
“Under such circumstances, low-educated and young migrant workers increasingly opted to find jobs in their home provinces located in the central and western regions, while educated migrants continued to move towards coastal large cities.”
The article can be found at: Liu et al. (2014) Interprovincial Migration, Regional Development and State Policy in China.
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Source: Springer; Photo: Remko Tanis/Flickr/CC.
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