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Abstract
With rapid urbanisation, millions of people from rural areas have migrated to major cities for employment, leaving their young children at home. This labour migration creates substantial mental and physical challenges for these left-behind children. This study establishes two empirical models for comparing the health status of left-behind children with that of children in rural areas without migrant parents and with that of migrant children in urban areas. Our empirical findings reveal that parental migration negatively affects the height and weight indices of left-behind children. The effects are particularly prominent for younger children, when both parents migrate or when parents migrate out of province.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to participants at The 7th International Symposium on Contemporary Labour Economics in Xiamen and Chinese Economist Society (CES) Annual Conference in Chengdu in 2013 for comments on early work, and to anonymous referees for constructive comments on the paper. Incorporating these comments has improved the paper, but we alone remain responsible for the content. The data and code used and supplemental estimates are available on request.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. In the RHS, since the birth year as well as birth month of the child are reported and the investigation time is during the Spring Festival (February 2008), we can calculate child’s age on a monthly basis. However, in the MHS, the age is just controlled on a yearly basis since we can only know the birth year or yearly age of children.
2. BMI = weight/height2.
3. According to the calculation of Z score, we get
4. Obesity is defined as WAZ above the 95th quartile within each gender-age group in the sample.
