A unique pattern of one-child family migration in China: The effects of personal features, family endowment and institutional elements

Abstract

Purpose

At the end of the 1970s, the Chinese government enacted the one-child policy; now the one-child successively enters into the labor market and reaches the age for marriage and childbirth. The floating population group of China’s interior regions also experiences the heterogeneity changes. The purpose of this paper is to analyses the reasons for the difference of family migration between one-child and non-only child using the binary logit regression model – from the three aspects of individual characteristics, family endowment and institutional factors were investigated.

Design/methodology/approach

Family migration or individual migration of the floating population is the dichotomous dependent variable and therefore the binomial logistic regression analysis model is selected.

Findings

It is found that the tendency of one-child family migration is significantly higher than that of non-only child. The main reason is that the one-child has obvious advantages in terms of individual characteristics, family endowment and institutional factors.

Originality/value

The previous researches on family migration: first, the previous researches mainly analyzed the impact of the human capital and family income on the family migration from the perspective of economics and neglected the discussion on the family structure, life cycle, family level factors and Hukou’s limitation; second, most researches considered the migration as a whole. In fact, the migration population is no longer a highly homogeneous group and gradually become diversified.

Citation

Mu, Y. and Yuan, X. (2017), "A unique pattern of one-child family migration in China: The effects of personal features, family endowment and institutional elements", Asian Education and Development Studies, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 153-165. https://doi.org/10.1108/AEDS-02-2016-0019