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[ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Feng Hu [et al.] Paru dans : China Economic Review, Volume 22, Issue 1, March 2011, Pages 64-74 Abstract Although there is a rich literature on internal temporary migration in China, few existing studies deal with the permanent migration decision of China's rural labor. This paper will fill this gap and deal with the permanent migration choice made by rural migrants with the China General Social Survey (CGSS) data. Our results show that compared with their circular counterparts, permanent migrants tend to stay within the home provinces and are more likely to have stable jobs and earn high incomes and thus are more adapted to urban lives. We also find that more educated and more experienced migrants tend to be permanent urban residents, while the relationship of age and the probability of permanent migration is inverse U-shaped. Due to the restrictions of the current hukou system and the lack of rural land rental market, those people with more children and more land at home are more likely to migrate circularly rather than permanently. Research Highlights ► It's the first to examine the permanent migration choice by China's rural migrants. ► We employ a unique nationally representative dataset. ► Our findings are robust to different definitions of "permanent migrant". ► Our findings provide a new insight and have important policy implications.

Chen, Binkai; Lu, Ming; Zhong, Ninghua In: Global COE Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series, February 2012 Abstract This paper provides a new explanation for China's extremely low consumption-to-GDP ratio, highlighting the constraints of the "household registration system" (Hukou) on China's household consumption. Our baseline results show that the consumption of migrants without an urban Hukou is 30.7% lower than that of urban residents. Moreover, consumption heterogeneity cannot be explained by migration effects, culture, social norms, habits or some other forms of household heterogeneity. Further studies on the composition of household consumption have shown that the gaps are largest in areas such as education and culture, durable goods and health. As both the number and income level of migrants are rising, the constraining effects of Hukou on household consumption will continue to increase.

8/05/2012 On May 3, Gengtian Zhang, Director of Research at the Urban China Initiative (UCI), gave a lecture on how to promote healthy urbanization for the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in Sichuan Province. Most of the 100 delegates at the talk were urban planning and policy directors and professionals, mainly from the NDRC offices for Sichuan Province, Kuoquan County, and individual cities in Sichuan. Zhang's lecture described the direction and focus of urbanization development inChina, including some research results from an international perspective, and proposed how to promote healthy urban development in China's cities. The lecture focused on six main ideas critical to China's continuing urbanization, including promoting a healthy model of urban development, improving the quality of urban planning, promoting the welfare of migrant workers and their integration into urban areas, improving China's city layouts, advancing urban agglomeration and megaregion development, and improving urbanization policies and regulations. Zhang opened by discussing the significance of promoting the urbanization process from the perspective of expanding domestic demand and enhancing economic and social development. He also described the main findings of UCI's recent report, "The 2011 Urban Sustainability Index", particularly relating to its implications for sustainable development. He stressed that we should regard migrant worker integration into cities as most important task in the next phase of China's urbanization. In regards to urban layout and physical planning, he described the future Functional Area Plan for Chinese cities, including the "two horizontal and three vertical" urbanization strategy pattern (to make Lianyungang-Urumqi channel and Yangtze channel two horizontal axis, and make coastal line, Haerbin-Beijing-Guangzhou channel and Baotou-Kunming channel three vertical axis of Urbanization zoning strategy

8/05/2012 On May 3, Gengtian Zhang, Director of Research at the Urban China Initiative (UCI), gave a lecture on how to promote healthy urbanization for the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in Sichuan Province. Most of the 100 delegates at the talk were urban planning and policy directors and professionals, mainly from the NDRC offices for Sichuan Province, Kuoquan County, and individual cities in Sichuan. Zhang's lecture described the direction and focus of urbanization development inChina, including some research results from an international perspective, and proposed how to promote healthy urban development in China's cities. The lecture focused on six main ideas critical to China's continuing urbanization, including promoting a healthy model of urban development, improving the quality of urban planning, promoting the welfare of migrant workers and their integration into urban areas, improving China's city layouts, advancing urban agglomeration and megaregion development, and improving urbanization policies and regulations. Zhang opened by discussing the significance of promoting the urbanization process from the perspective of expanding domestic demand and enhancing economic and social development. He also described the main findings of UCI's recent report, "The 2011 Urban Sustainability Index", particularly relating to its implications for sustainable development. He stressed that we should regard migrant worker integration into cities as most important task in the next phase of China's urbanization. In regards to urban layout and physical planning, he described the future Functional Area Plan for Chinese cities, including the "two horizontal and three vertical" urbanization strategy pattern (to make Lianyungang-Urumqi channel and Yangtze channel two horizontal axis, and make coastal line, Haerbin-Beijing-Guangzhou channel and Baotou-Kunming channel three vertical axis of Urbanization zoning strate

Abstract Taking Beijing as a case study, this paper analyses new trends in peri-urbanisation and the city's planning responses after 2000 in China. The results of the analysis show that the percentage of temporary migrant residents continues to grow in the peri-urban region and the social inequalities in relation to quality of life between local people and migrants have increased there. In particular, there is a concentration of thousands of young and well-educated migrants in the peri-urban region, resulting in a new kind of urban slum. Sprawling development still dominates Beijing's fringe. New planning policies related to an urban-rural integration strategy have played a positive role in improving living conditions in rural areas and reducing the social and economic gaps between urban and rural areas in the peri-urban region. However, planning in the peri-urban region is still facing new challenges due to vertically and horizontally fragmented management, growing market forces, and social discrimination caused by the remnants of the hukou mechanism. This suggests that it will not be easy to achieve the planning goal of urban-rural integration and harmony society unless further actions are taken to enhance political capacity of planning system in Beijing. The capacity-building of planning should be facilitated if institutional innovations can be made in arrangements of power, rights, public resources, accountability, and legitimacy in the planning system. Highlights ► Many new trends in peri-urbanisation have appeared after 2000 in Beijing. ► Peri-urbanisation contributes to growth in social inequalities. ► It will not be easy to achieve the planning goal of urban-rural integration. ► New urban-rural integration policies are facing challenges. ► The institutional capacity of planning needs to be reinforced.

Authors: Chao Li (University of Waikato) John Gibson (University of Waikato) Abstract China's local populations can be counted in two ways; by how many people have hukou household registration from each place and by how many people actually reside in each place. The counts differ by the non-hukou migrants - people that move from their place of registration - who have grown from fewer than five million when reform began in 1978 to over 200 million by 2010. For most of the first three decades of the reform era, the hukou count was used to produce per capita GDP figures. In coastal provinces the resident count is many millions more than the hukou count, while for migrant-sending provinces it is the reverse, creating a systematic and time-varying distortion in provincial GDP per capita. Moreover, a sharp discontinuity occurred when provinces recently switched from the hukou count to the resident count when reporting GDP per capita. A double-count also resulted because some provinces switched before others and initial resident counts were incomplete. This paper describes the changing definition of provincial populations in China and their impact on inequality in provincial GDP per capita. We show that much of the apparent increase in inter-provincial inequality disappears once a consistent series of GDP per resident is used.

Summary China has seen the largest human migration in history, and the country's rapid urbanisation has important consequences for public health. A provincial analysis of its urbanisation trends shows shifting and accelerating rural-to-urban migration across the country and accompanying rapid increases in city size and population. The growing disease burden in urban areas attributable to nutrition and lifestyle choices is a major public health challenge, as are troubling disparities in health-care access, vaccination coverage, and accidents and injuries in China's rural-to-urban migrant population. Urban environmental quality, including air and water pollution, contributes to disease both in urban and in rural areas, and traffic-related accidents pose a major public health threat as the country becomes increasingly motorised. To address the health challenges and maximise the benefits that accompany this rapid urbanisation, innovative health policies focused on the needs of migrants and research that could close knowledge gaps on urban population exposures are needed.

China is facing ecological revolution now. The basis of the revolution is establishing the ecological consciousness. Different level of ecological consciousness in urban and rural area raised our attention. According to different environment conditions and based on pollution theory, we try to find out the cornerstone of setting ecological consciousness during this changing time. Since China is on the fast urbanization period, environmental awareness change on rural-urban migrants can be this key. This paper focused on which factor(s) have significant effect to ecological consciousness. Urban and Rural residents were interviewed for data collecting, and for deep research, three groups (Urban Residents Group, Rural residents Group and Migrants Group) are split based on responders' migration experience. In this paper, ANOVA analysis and regression analysis are used. Based on pollution-driven theory, two models are given to compare the explanation strengths between within and without theory variables. We found that pollution experience and relative pollute have important effect on eco-consciousness. So Ecological Consciousness is not straight influenced by environment condition, but people think about the deterioration. We considered that, the cornerstone of setting ecological consciousness is recognizing the crisis and disruption of ecological environment.

4/09/2012 The Urban China Initiative (UCI) had its biggest event of the year on September 7th in Tsinghua Science Park - the 2012 Annual Forum, inspiring enlightening discussions among participants from public, private and academic sectors to develop policy thinking that will help address China's urbanization challenges. Themed "China's New Urban Era" as China's urban population surpassed that of rural areas for the first time in 2011, the event brought together about 50 urban leaders and more than 400 professionals from the urban field. The Forum consists of keynote speech, three plenary panels and three breakout panels. Keynote speakers include: Yang Weimin, Vice Minister of office of Central Leading Group on Finance and Economic Affairs; Gu Shengzu, Deputy Director of Internal and Judicial Affairs Committee at National People's Congress and Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of the China National Democratic Construction Association; Li Xiaojiang, President of China Academy of Urban Planning and Design; Li Dongming, General Manager, Urban Fund of China Development Bank Capital. The plenaries showcased three UCI flagship projects: urban citizenship of Chinese migrants; research on mega regions and the China urban indicators system. The three breakouts showcased UCI's five latest grant projects. The forum brought together leaders from UCI partners including the National Development and Reform Commission, local DRC, China Society of Urban Studies, Development and Research Center of the State Council, China Center for Urban Development, China Development and Reform Foundation, Chinese Academy of Urban Planning and Design, Chinese Academy of Urban Development, Fung Global Institute, New Cities Foundation, Rio Tinto, BMW, CDBC, Tsinghua, Columbia Global Centers and CITIC Property. To find more about the Forum: Highlights of the keynotes and forum news Research and speeches of the plenary and breakout panels Media report on UCI 2012 Ann

" We evaluate the role that cities play on individual productivity in China. First, we show that location explains a large share of nominal wage disparities. Second, even after controlling for individual and -firms characteristics and instrumenting city characteristics, the estimated elasticity of wage with respect to employment density is about three times larger than inWestern countries. Land area and industrial specialisation also play a significant role whereas the access to external markets does not. Therefore, large agglomeration economies prevail in China and they are more localised than in Western countries. Third, we -find evidence of a large positive impact of the local share of migrants on local workers'wages. Overall, these results strongly support the productivity gains that can be expected from further migration and urbanisation in China. "

DOI: http://dx.doi.org.gate3.inist.fr/10.1016/j.worlddev.2011.11.002 [ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Shiqing Jiang (Fudan University, Shanghai), Ming Lu (Zhejiang University, Hangzhou), Hiroshi Sato (Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo) Paru dans : World Development, Volume 40, Issue 6, June 2012, Pages 1190-1200 Summary This paper presents the impact of income inequality on subjective well-being using data from the 2002 Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) Survey. We find that people feel unhappy with between-group inequality, as measured by the income gap between migrants without local urban hukou (household registration identity) and urban residents, irrespective of whether they are urban residents with or without local hukou. However, when we control for identity-related inequality and other individual, household, and city-level characteristics, inequality (as measured by city-level Gini coefficients) positively correlates with happiness. This study contributes to the inequality-happiness literature by distinguishing between the different effects of between-group and general inequality on happiness.

International Comparative Analysis of Poverty in Asia: Urbanization, Migration and Social Policy Symposium held at Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China, November 1-4, 2012 Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU) and the Institute for Poverty Alleviation and International Development (IPAID) are jointly organizing a symposium in October 2012 on the effects of urbanization and poverty alleviation in Asia. The main purpose is to address the widening income gap between rural and urban areas in Asia in the past thirty years. Development scholars, researchers, and practitioners are invited to submit high-quality papers with a focus on the symposium theme of urbanization and migration in Asia and its affect on poverty in both rural and urban areas. The symposium aims to create a dialogue among scholars of Asian development studies to address effective urban and rural poverty reduction strategies. The symposium will focus on the following set of issues which include (but are not limited to): Rural development and urbanization in Asia International standards of poverty alleviation Access to land and land right education (rights, inequity, and poverty) Labor mobility and poverty Gender based income inequality Social policy to tackle poverty and inequality Housing, transportation and infrastructure development National policies and measures for the eradication of poverty The symposium will conclude with an excursion to disaster areas in Chengdu affected by the 2008 earthquake which killed an estimated 69,000 people. SWJTU has taken a lead in the recovery efforts and research cooperation in the field of poverty alleviation in Western China's less developed areas. Selected papers from the symposium will be published in a special edited volume of the Journal of Poverty Alleviation and International Development (JPAID) in 2013. Submission Deadlines Submission of a 500 word abstract is due by September 15, 2012. If accepted, SWJTU will communicate with you in

UCI delegation participated in first annual NCF summit in Paris 25/05/2012 The Chinese delegation takes a group photo with Lady Barbara, Judge, Chairman of the UK Pension Protection Fund. The first annual New Cities Foundation (NCF) Summit was held in Paris on May 14-16. The summit brought together more than 500 urban policy makers and thought leaders to a three-day conference on global urbanization, with China as one of the core focuses. The mayor of Paris delivered a welcome speech. Other speakers including Gregor Robertson, Mayor of Vancouver; Ron Huldai, Mayor of Tel Aviv; Khalifa Sall, Mayor of Dakar; Greg Clark, UK Minister of State for Decentralisation and Cities; as well as the CEOs of General Motors, Ericsson, Cisco, and Suez gas. The Urban China Initiative (UCI), a partner of the NCF, assisted in organizing the summit by inviting and organizing 16 government delegates, enterprise leaders, and academics from China, as well as designing the plenary session "A Closer Look at Urban China: Towards the Urban Billion." Chinese delegates shared their insights as speakers at plenary and breakout sessions, including: "Securing Investments for the Urban Century: How do we Pay for the Urban Boom," which featured Li Dongming, General Manager of the Urban Fund at China Development Bank Capital, as a speaker. "Hard and Software City," which featured Jonathan Woetzel, Co-Chair of the Urban China Initiative, Senior Director at McKinsey & Co., as a speaker. "A Closer Look at Urban China: Towards the Urban Billion," which featured five speakers from the UCI delegation, including Yuan Yue, CEO and Chairman of Horizon Research Consultancy Group; James Lee, AIA LEED-AP, President of iContinuum Group; Jonathan Woetzel; Xiao Jincheng, Deputy Director of the Land Economy and Regional Research Bureau at the National Development and Reform Commission; and Xie Chengxiang, Deputy Mayor of Huangshi in Hubei Province. "Modern Urban

Sur le site "The Urban China Initiaitve" 4/05/2012 By Li Jing ( China Daily) Urban leaders do more to safeguard environment, conserve resources Small and medium-sized cities are more livable than big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai gauged by their air quality, waste treatment capacity and built environment, according to newly published research by Urban China Initiative. A woman rides a bicycle on a windy day in Beijing. According to recently published research by Urban China Initiative, Beijing and Shanghai were absent from a ranking of the top 10 Chinese cities gauged by their environmental sustainability. [Photo/China Daily] UCI, a think tank launched by Tsinghua University, McKinsey & Co and Columbia University, gauged the sustainability of 112 major Chinese cities using 17 indicators in four categories - society, economy, environment and resources. Beijing ranked first in sustainability thanks to its heavy investment in social welfare - including social security, education and healthcare - and its economic achievements. The top 10 cities in overall score - including Xiamen, Fujian province, Haikou, the capital of Hainan province, Dalian in Liaoning province, and Shanghai - are all medium and large-sized cities. However, small and medium-sized cities are taking the lead in environmental sustainability. Both Beijing and Shanghai were absent from the top 10 in this category. According to the research, Haikou has the best air quality, while Hefei, capital of Anhui province, took the lead in waste treatment facilities. And Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, boasts the best built environment - man-made surroundings that serve as the setting for human activity. "Such a result shows that small cities have a better quality of life, though people living in megacities like Beijing and Shanghai have better access to medical and educational resources," said Jonathan Woetzel, co-chair of UCI, as well as a senior global dir

Author : Nate Berg Feb 29, 2012 Why China's Urbanization Isn't Creating a Middle Class Nate Berg Feb 29, 2012 11 Comments Why China's Urbanization Isn't Creating a Middle Class Reuters Share Print Share on emailEmail The rapid rate of development in China manifests itself most clearly in its cities. With some populations rising into the tens of millions, China's cities are the economic powerhouses of the country, and are helping to create a whole new era of financial prosperity. For some observers, this translates into 1.3 billion people who now have the money to afford the sort of commercial goods many of the country's factories had previously been producing for the affluent populations of other countries. China is seeing its own affluence rise, and some surmise that this will translate into a Western-style nation of relatively well-off consumers; that, as this report from the McKinsey Global Institute suggests, China's middle class is emerging to help propel the country's economic success even higher. The only problem is that this middle class doesn't actually exist. And unless decades-old rules change, it won't. In a recent paper published in the journal Eurasian Geography and Economics, geographer and University of Washington professor Kam Wing Chan argues that all of the country's urban growth and prosperity is not actually filtering down to the majority of the rising urban population. The reason is that the majority of the urban population is prevented from fully participating in the booming urban economy because of a Mao-era rule that draws a harsh line between those from urban areas and those from rural ones [...]