Land Use Rights, Market Transition, and Rural-urban Labor Migration in China (1980-84)

Chen, Yiu Por. (2012). Land Use Rights, Market Transition, and Rural-urban Labor Migration in China (1980-84). UC Los Angeles: The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Online at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3pk220mn#

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the way shifts in property utilization rights in China induced another sequence of institutional changes that led to the rise of rural-urban labor migration from 1980 to 1984, a critical period in the country’s market transition. I show that the 1980s’ Household Responsibility System (HRS), which brought family farming back from the communal system, endowed rural households not only with land use rights, but also with de facto labor allocation rights. These shifts in property relationspromoted a growth in agricultural market size as well as the emergence of intraprovincial non-hukou rural-urban migration, which may have made labor retention policies such as the small township strategy ineffective, and may have given the government an incentive to deregulate its subsequent labor market policy.

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Monique Abud

Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, EHESS, Paris, France

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Monique Abud (October 30, 2012). Land Use Rights, Market Transition, and Rural-urban Labor Migration in China (1980-84). URBACHINA. Retrieved October 3, 2024 from https://urbachina.hypotheses.org/1196