Rural elderly have 40% of the income of those in urban areas, spend a larger share of their income on food, are in worse health, work later into their lives, and depend more on their children, lacking pensions and public services. The birth quota since 1980 has particularly restricted the childbearing of rural less educated women, who now face retirement with fewer children for support. Inequal...

The Ecuadorian Amazon, one of the richest reserves of biodiversity in the world, has faced one of the highest rates of deforestation of any Amazonian nation. Most of this forest elimination has been caused by agricultural colonization that followed the discovery of oil fields in 1967. Since the 1990s, an increasing process of urbanization has also engendered new patterns of population mobility ...

Two-fifths of the 279 million children in China are directly affected by the on-going massive internal migration. Using data from a nationally representative survey covering junior high school students in both rural and urban areas, we examine the causal impacts of different migration processes (parental migration, child migration, and hukou conversion) on rural children’s wellbeing measured by...

In this paper, we use the “2002 Chinese Household Income Project Survey” (CHIPS2002) data to examine how heterogeneous social interactions affect the peer effect in the rural–urban migration decision in China. We find that the peer effect, measured by the village migration ratio, significantly increases the individual probability of outward migration. We also find that the magnitude of the peer...

Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have moved into Chinese cities since the early 1990s contributing greatly to economic growth, yet, they are often blamed for reducing urban ‘native’workers’ employment opportunities, suppressing their wages and increasing pressure on infrastructure and other public facilities. This paper examines the causal relationship between rural-urban migration and ur...

This paper examines the determinants and consequences of rural to urban registration (hukou) mobility in contemporary China, focusing on the link between social origins, hukou conversion, and the consequences of conversion. In contrast to massive rural-urban migration, hukou conversion is difficult and rare, but childhood urban residence increases the likelihood of achieving an urban hukou. Com...

This paper disaggregates the various sources of rural income growth in Peru between 2004 and 2012 and shows that about 80% of the increase came from rising earnings and only 15% from transfer programs. This increase in rural earnings was not led by agriculture. It was mainly because of a general rise in wages across industrial and services activities within the rural population, coupled with a ...

Urbanization is an important demographic phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa, and rural-urban migration remains a major contributor to urban growth. In a context of sustained economic recession, these demographic processes have been associated with a rise in urban poverty and ill health. Developments in health service provision need to reflect new needs arising from demographic and disease ecology...