Author(s)

Heng Yu

Corresponding Author

Heng Yu

ABSTRACT

The underlying principle behind rural-to-migration in China can be summarized by the inequality of social welfare distribution like health care and education resources amongst different cities and provinces, and China’s huge population base makes the population flow and crowd behavior even more convoluted. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence on the effect health care can have on population net flow for a given city (positive net flow denotes population net inflow and vice versa). The panel data we use was collected from the annual statistic yearbook of 19 different Chinese cities on a timespan of 13 years from 2005 to 2017. Cities of different development levels are selected to make an unbiased sample for net population flow. Our theory suggests that the effect of social economic development (in this case we take health care development as proxy variable) varies between different development phases and hence a three-point economic development theory on population flow has been proposed through induction. Through pooled panel OLS and Fixed Effect regression analysis, we prove that our model on the relationship between city development and population net flow is correct. For cities with either early or late development stages, our analysis suggests that social effect through internet plays an important role upon individual migration decisions in China.

KEYWORDS

Migration, health care, crowd behaviour, social media