Rural Infrastructure Supply and Population Mobility—An Empirical Analysis Based on Microdata for Rural China

Abstract

Using microdata from rural China, we estimated the impact of rural infrastructure provision on the migration decisions of the floating population. We find that as the level of local public infrastructure provision increases, the amount of in-migration also increases, and this effect is more pronounced for individuals with work experience outside the countryside, however, it shows a downward trend from eastern, central, and western China sequentially. We find that the influx of in-migrants is facilitated by the improvement of livelihood-type infrastructure, including health care and education infrastructure, while in-migration is generally discouraged by improvements to agricultural production-type infrastructure. Our findings remain robust under alternative analyses. At the individual level, the demographic “pull” of rural infrastructure has a positive U-shape, that is, as people age, they tend to move to villages with better infrastructure, particularly for less educated laborers. At the household and village levels, migration decisions are a function of a range of public goods and factors, such as household car ownership, the presence of local non-farm industries, village location, local ecological, security conditions, employment, and income status. The findings of this paper contribute to the literature on rural population and rural revitalization issues and complement the literature related to rural-to-urban migration processes, which has found that two-way population mobility mechanisms contribute to sustainable urbanization and social stability.