The effect of childhood left‑behind experience on individual’s income: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Childhood circumstances may have a long-term impact on individual life-cycle outcomes. Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we explore the long-term effect of childhood left-behind experience due to parental rural-to-urban migration. The extended regression model is employed to address the potential endogeneity of being left-behind children with an instrument variable. The results indicate that the left-behind experience in childhood leads to a significantly lower income in adulthood. Robustness checks using the probability of being relative poverty validate our findings. Mechanism analysis shows that parental migration would reduce household income per capita, childrenʻs health outcomes, and the probability of enrolling in post-compulsory education, which were the possible channels. Our analysis highlights the long-term consequences of childhood left-behind experience, which suggests the need for preventive intervention to improve the early development of left-behind children and throughout the life course.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood left-behind experience
• long-Term effect
• individualʻs income
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I20
• J13
• O15

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 An ERM fits a linear regression model that accommodates any kind of endogenous covariates, such as continuous, binary, and ordinal endogenous covariates. However, the two-stage least square (2SLS) regression is only suitable for continuous endogenous variables to tackle the endogeneity problem.

2 Data from Beijing, Chongqing, Guangxi, Guizhou, Heilongjiang, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shanxi, Shandong, Shanghai, Yunnan, and Zhejiang were collected.

3 Parental migration is always throughout childrenʻs childhood, and we test it in robust check III.

4 The low prevalence of individuals with leftbehind experiences (6.43%, much lower than the data in Table 1) is due to that some left-behind children have not grown up.

5 The HAZ was defined as the number of standard deviations that a personʻs height is away from the median height of a reference population of healthy children of the same age and sex. The growth chart published by World Health Organization (WHO) was the reference height distribution.

6 Following Erikson and Goldthorpe (2002), we categorized the occupation items into twelve major classes. The twelve major types are as follow: Class 1: others (reference group). Class 2: Agricultural workers, such as farmers. Class 3: Nonskilled manual workers, such as factory workers. Class 4: Skilled manual workers, such as the driver. Class 5: Routine nonmanual employees, such as hairdressers, waiters. Class 6: Skilled manual workers (higher-grade), such as soldiers. Class 7: Technicians, such as handicraftsmen. Class 8: Routine nonmanual employees (higher-grade), such as clerks. Class 9: Professionals, such as athletes, actors. Class 10: Professionals (higher-grade), such as university professors, physicians, doctors. Class 11: Administrators and managers, such as military officers. Class 12: Administrators and managers (higher-grade), such as directors of public offices and large companies. In the empirical analysis, the occupation status is reduced to a continuous variable on a scale of 1 to 12, where a higher score means a higher occupation status (Hodge 1981).

7 The community means either an entire village or only a few blocks in cities. The CHNS sample communities are drawn from cities, suburbs, towns, or villages of China, all entities that are legally identified by the National Bureau of Statistics of China. In survey data, we do not know the communityʻs exact name, but we can see the community code for each household. Consequently, the households are from the same community if their community codes are the same; the proportion is based on the sample over 18 years old in a community, and it excludes the family of the child$i.$

8 Eastern China, Central China, and Western China are defined based on the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1986–1990), which grouped the different provinces of China into three economic zones. Eastern China is more developed than others are.

9 The result is different from the finding of Du, Park, and Wang (2005) that having a migrant increases a household income per capita by 8.5 to 13.1%. Our finding suggests that the income effect may be modest because people in low-income families tend to migrate to work.

10 The childʻs HAZ is converted into height, according to the child growth standards of the WHO. https://www.who.int/childgrowth/standards/technical_report/en/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Tsinghua Rural Studies PhD Scholarship [No. 202104] and the project of Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science [No. GD20CYJ09].