The moderating role of Internet use in the relationship between China’s internal migration and generalized trust

ABSTRACT

While there is a large literature on the determinants of generalized trust, few studies have explored the impact of internal migration and attempted to tackle potential endogeneity issues. Using nationally representative data from the latest five rounds of the China General Society Survey, this paper estimates the impact of internal migration on generalized trust by exploiting arguably exogenous, historical changes in the GDP growth target set by the government and the share of migrants at the county level. We find evidence of a significant negative impact of internal migration on generalized trust. We also investigate the moderating role of Internet use, and find that whilst Internet use significantly attenuates the negative impact on generalized trust of internal migration, this moderating effect is much stronger for urban-to-urban migrants than it is for rural-to-urban migrants. The results further indicate that internal migration in China has led to the deterioration of subjective well-being, changing perceptions of fairness, increased likelihood of downward social mobility, and deterioration in social relations, which we interpret as potential mechanisms behind our findings.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• internal migration
• generalized trust
• Internet use

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 It is worth noting that income as a control variable has many missing values (about 10% of the full sample) even after data cleaning. Directly deleting these observations with missing values may cause estimation biases. Therefore, as a preliminary data analysis, we have checked whether our results are sensitive to different sample restrictions by employing a multiple imputation method developed by Royston (2004) to impute missing values for income. The results are similar to those in our main analysis (the results for estimations with multiple imputation are available from the authors upon request).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 71603052).

Notes on contributors

Haiyang Lu

Haiyang Lu is an associate professor in the West Center for Economic Research at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. His research focuses on rural-urban migration, social impacts of ICT use, and subjective well-beings.

Ivan T. Kandilov

Ivan T. Kandilov is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University. He conducts research on international trade, economic development, as well as labor and agricultural policy.