Does migration experience reduce villagers’ social capital? Evidence from rural China

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examine the impact of migration experience on return migrant’s social capital using household survey data from rural China. We first develop a simple model to describe rural household’s decision to invest in social capital and then empirically examine how migration experience affects social capital using village-level natural disasters as instrumental variables for migration experience. Our results show that villagers’ migration experience reduces both structural social capital and cognitive social capital. Compared with those who never worked out of their native villages, return migrants would practice fewer social interactions, information communication, trust building and reciprocal behaviours with relatives. We provide suggestive evidence that the decline in social capital may be caused by the higher expected mobility of return migrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration experience
• structural social capital
• cognitive social capital
• mobility
• rural china

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J61·R23

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2022.2115453.

Notes

¹ $i$ is ignored throughout this section for the notation brevity.

² We let migration experience be a 0–1 dummy because we do not have information on the precise duration of the respondents’ migration experience and cannot empirically investigate its effect on social capital.

³ $I_t$, which is a more realistic and plausible assumption.:

⁴ The provinces include Anhui, Yunnan, Tianjin, Liaoning, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Jiangxi, Henan, Hebei, Fujian, Gansu, Guangxi, Guangdong, Ningxia, Guizhou, Shandong, Zhejiang and Tibet.

⁵ We distinguish return migrants and those who temporarily returned home during holidays or peak agricultural seasons. We exclude the latter from our analysis because they are ongoing migrants and stayed home for too short a period to make any meaningful social capital investment (if any).

⁶ Considering most migrant worker in China tend to temporarily return hometown during holidays or peak agricultural seasons, 6 consecutive months may be a proper duration for the definition of migration.

⁷ The corresponding questions asked in the survey are: 1. How much do you trust in your relatives? 2. How much was the transfer with your relatives in 2017?

⁸ The definitions and summary statistics of all variables used in this paper are shown in Appendix Table A1.

⁹ In most cases, the stock-flow of distinction is immaterial since the comparative statics for the stock of capital and the flow of investment are identical. The comparative statics only differ when age is varied, but our empirical analysis doesn’t refer to the comparative statics of age. Thus, we won’t discuss the stock-flow of distinction for social capital in the remainder of this paper.

¹⁰ The KLK index is defined as the equally weighted average of z-scores of its components. The z-scores are calculated by subtracting the control group mean and dividing by the control group standard deviation.

¹¹ The first-stage parameter estimates are similar to the Panel B in Table 2, we ellipsis it for simplicity.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2021M700262]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [71861147002].