Does Childhood Left-Behind Experience Affect New Generation of Migrant Workers’ Willingness to Settle in Towns and Cities?

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates whether the experience of being left during childhood affects the new generation of migrant workers’ willingness to settle in towns and cities and its internal mechanism from a life-cycle perspective. Using the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, we found that the experience of being left behind during childhood has a significantly negative impact on people’s willingness to settle in towns and cities, and it has an impact through the individual’s education level, health status, financial situation and social skills. Furthermore, heterogeneity analysis reveals that the abovementioned effects were more notable in the samples left-behind experience with female, high frequency of mobility, short period of mobility, cross-provincial, and being left behind when both parents are working in cities. These findings add to the research on population migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Left-behind
• new generation of migrant workers
• willingness to settle in towns and cities
• urbanization process

JEL:

• J10
• J16
• J61
• R00

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/10.1080/1540496X.2023.2216841.

Notes

1. Limited by the length of the article, see Section IA-1 of the Supplementary materials.

2. Years of education are converted from the respondents’ education level in the questionnaire. “No Schooling” is assigned a value of 0. “Elementary School” is assigned a value of 6. “Junior High School” is assigned a value of 9. “High School/Technical Secondary School” is assigned a value of 12. “College” is assigned a value of 15. “Undergraduate” is 16, and “Graduate” is 19.

3. Limited by the length of the article, see Section IA-2 of the Supplementary materials.

4. Limited by the length of the article, see Section IA-3 of the Supplementary materials.

5. Limited by the length of the article, see Section IA-4 of the Supplementary materials.

6. Limited by the length of the article, see Section IA-5 of the Supplementary materials.

7. Limited by the length of the article, see Section IA-6 of the Supplementary materials.

8. Limited by the length of the article, see Section IA-7 of the Supplementary materials.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Graduate Research and Innovation Projects of Jiangsu Province under Grant [KYCX21_1443]; Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Nanjing university of finance and economics under Grant [BSZX2021-09].