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The purpose of this paper is to take occupation opportunity as an indicator to examine the impact of hukou on labor market segmentation in China. It estimates the scale of the impact and identifies the way of the impact. Especially, the paper takes hukou uniform reform as an example and tests whether hukou reforms helped in eliminating labor market segmentation.

The data sets this paper adopted are the 2000 Census and 2005 Mini Census data in China. Linear model and Probit model are used in estimating hukou's impact. Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition is used in decomposing the difference in occupation distribution among hukou statuses. DID evaluation method is used in comparing the region with hukou uniform reform and the region without to capture the influence of the reform.

The result shows that occupation segmentation based on hukou significantly exists in urban labor market. Hukou uniform reform improved the occupation opportunity of local rural workers but migrating rural workers were somehow crowded out. Migrating urban workers did not benefit from the reform. To conclude these, the reform released employment segmentation between rural and urban workers within the reformed region but strengthened the segmentation between the local residents and outcomers which could influence future labor source and scale in reformed area.

The paper evaluates the hukou uniform reform's impact on the labor market using an empirical way for the first time and makes concrete policy recommendations based on these findings.

Purpose: This study investigates how couple similarity in various aspects affects their life satisfaction and how these impacts vary across educational groups among the young married couples in Shanghai.

Methodology: This study employs the pooled data from three waves of the Fudan Yangtze River Delta Social Transformation Survey which sampled Shanghai youths born between 1980 and 1989, the first single-child generation. Couple similarity is evaluated through the comparison in age, hukou status, education, and income quartile between the husband and wife. Ordered logistic regression model is applied to assess the impacts of couple similarity on life satisfaction.

Findings: Marriage hypergamy in age, education, and income barely have any impacts on couples’ life satisfaction, while hukou comparison, as an important indication of social stratification in Shanghai, is strongly associated with life satisfaction. The couple in which husband holds the urban hukou and wife rural hukou as well as the couple in which both partners hold the urban hukou are significantly happier than those in which both partners hold the rural hukou. Such a positive impact is partially explained by the higher husband’s decision-making power in male-advantaged families. Moreover, husband’s urban hukou status is especially important for those without college education, but not for those with college education.

Values: This chapter highlights the importance of hukou hypergamy in life satisfaction for married couples, in particular, lower-educated couples in Shanghai. These findings reveal an implicit but persistent preference for male-dominated family model, where husbands retain a higher decision-making power that, in turn, promotes life satisfaction for both partners.

This paper first reviews the history of social insurance policy and coverage in urban China, documenting the evolution in the coverage of pensions, medical and unemployment insurance for both local residents and migrants, and highlighting obstacles to expanding coverage. The paper then uses two waves of the China Urban Labor Survey, conducted in 2005 and 2010, to examine the correlates of social insurance participation before and after implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract Law. A higher labor tax wedge is associated with a lower probability that local employed residents participate in social insurance programs, but is not associated with participation of wage-earning migrants, who are more likely to be dissuaded by fragmentation of the social insurance system. The existing gender gap in social insurance coverage is explained by differences in coverage across industrial sectors and firm ownership classes in which men and women work.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to sketch the current policy context that frames the education of migrant children in Shanghai; to explore the work lives of school leaders in the privately owned but government-supported schools; and to understand the socio-cultural and educational factors that shape the leadership practices in these schools.

This paper drew from publicly accessible policy papers and interview data with four principals leading migrant children’s schools in Shanghai.

Migrant children’s schools have received increasing policy recognition and attention. Principals of these schools have strived to adopt various leadership strategies to enhance the quality of education as received by migrant children. However, due to the institutional barriers such as hukou, multiple challenges continue to face migrant children and leaders leading migrant schools.

This is one of the first few papers that collected data from principals leading migrant children’s schools. The paper contributes to further understandings about leadership in high-needs school context and about education quality and equity in relation to programme for international student assessment success in Shanghai.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structure and changes of China’s land system. To achieve this aim, the paper is divided into four parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements; the second part analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change; the third part engages the discussion about the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes; and the final part is conclusion and some policy implications.

After 40 years of reforms and opening up, China has not only created a growth miracle unparalleled for any major country in human history, but also transformed itself from a rural to an urban society. Behind this great transformation is a systemic reform in land institutions. Rural land institutions went from collectively owned to household responsibility system, thereby protecting farmers’ land rights. This process resulted in long-term sustainable growth in China’s agriculture, a massive rural-urban migration and a historical agricultural transformation. The conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural uses and the introduction of market mechanisms made land a policy tool in driving high economic growth, industrialization and urbanization.

Research shows that the role of land and its relationship with the economy will inevitably change as China’s economy enters a new stage of medium-to-high speed growth. With economic restructuring, low-cost industrial land will be less effective. Urbanization is also shifting from rapid expansion to endogenous growth so that returns on land capitalization will decrease and risks will increase. Therefore, China must abandon land-dependent growth model through deepening land reforms and adapt a new pattern of economic development.

This paper gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements, analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change, and evaluates the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate farmers’ attitudes and behavior toward land titling and to study its potential effects on rural development.

Using household survey data collected from five provinces of China in 2010, this paper assesses farmer’s attitudes toward land titling and examines the potential effects of land titling on rural land transferring and labor migration.

Rural residential land titling has significant effects on farmers’ attitudes toward land transferring and their migration intention. Farmers who have more non-agricultural development opportunities are more likely to welcome land titling. The titling of rural residential land could provide secure property rights for farmers, and thus stimulate them to trade, mortgage their rural residential property, and migrate to urban areas.

Land titling in rural China will probably affect rural land transferring and encourage rural labor migrate to urban, and thus promote rural development.

This paper investigates farmers’ attitudes and behavior toward land titling, and examines its potential effects on rural land transferring and labor migration, based on national survey data. This paper sheds new lights on farmers’ demand for types of land tenure reforms and how these reforms would affect the perceived opportunities available for farmers.

To explore income inequality in urban China, this paper investigates disparities between- and within-urban locals and rural migrants from 2002 to 2013, using three waves of the China Household Income Project (CHIP) data. While the existing literature concentrates on the wage disparity between these two groups, our results show that the Gini among the migrants increased by 17.86% between 2007 and 2013 and that among the locals increased by 15.54% from 2002 to 2007. The urban–migrant average income gap decreased during the whole period mainly due to higher growth in migrants’ average income. Estimates based on Mincerian earnings functions for both groups reveal the significant role of the education, occupation and type of contract in determining the within-group inequality. In addition, using a recentred influence function (RIF), we observe that short-term and other types of contracts, duration of the job, in-system ownership, marriage and skill have inequality-enhancing effects for migrants. The variation of skills has a larger impact on the income disparity among migrants than on that among urban locals. The RIF-based Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition of the mean difference of incomes shows that labour market discrimination between the two groups is not significant; however, both pure explained and unexplained differences are significant when applying the RIF decomposition to the variance of the logarithms of incomes. While the type of contract significantly reduces the pure explained difference between migrants and urban locals, occupation has a positive impact on this difference between these two groups. The heterogenity analysis shows that the factors influencing incomes in these two groups are different. We recommend labour market intervention to reduce unreasonable occupational and sectoral disparities, especially in the net inflow provinces, to mitigate urban inequality in China effectively.

The purpose of this article was to discuss the phenomenon of international talent mobility and competition in relation to China's engagement in the “talent war” for attracting, retaining and managing global talents, from a policy perspective.

The author adopts an approach combining literature review and international comparative analysis.

Factors explaining global talent mobility have been predominantly economic. This paper argues that China should also focus on other critical non-economic aspects for attracting and retaining talents in the long-term. The Chinese Government may learn from the experience of other competing countries in developing a national strategy for attracting and retaining global talents. While China has an advantage in attracting overseas Chinese who are attached to its cultural roots and are other competing countries' residents or citizens, its existing talent policy may not be able to create effective local and institutional environment in attracting and retaining needed talents.

An attractive policy is key to winning the global talent war and determining the future development path of a nation. The talent policy at a national level should address not only economic factors but also personal, professional and institutional factors.

Winning the global talent war is a policy competition among countries. The Chinese Government may succeed in the war for talent by adopting a multi-pronged, multi-level and long-term talent strategy. This paper calls for China to reconsider its recent reform on permanent residence (green card) policy reform from a global talent competition perspective.

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.

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

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.

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.