抄録
The urban-rural return migration phenomenon in China is gradually drawing attention from researchers. Some have the optimistic notion that many returnees are successes in host urban area, so must contribute to the development in home rural area. Others have skeptical notion that returnees are failures in urban labour market. To make a stir in this controversy, using the survey data conducted in Henan province in 2010, this study empirically analyses the factors which decide return intention of Chinese migrant rural workers. In contrast with past literatures we treat the migrant’s wage in the city, which is main determinant of out or return migration, as endogenous variable. As the first stage of probit model with instrument variables, we estimated Mincer-type
wage function. The estimation results support human capital hypothesis in the context of migrant labour market. The dependent variable in the second stage is the binary one which equals 1 if the migrant intends to return in the future, equals 0 if otherwise. The estimation results indicate the wage level of the migrant who intends to return is lower than the migrant who intends to stay in the city. This result seems to support the skepticism for returnees’ contribution to development of rural area. Then we divides the whole samples into two sub-samples by the intention to establish own business, estimated the same return intention functions. The estimated results are interesting. On the group that does not intend to establish own business, wage have the significantly negative
effect on the intention of return as previous model. On the other hands, wage does not have any significant effect on the intention of return on the group that intends to establish own business. Although our statistical evidence isn’t strong, we conclude that we cannot reject optimistic notion of returnees’ positive impacts to the development of home rural area.
