DOI: 10.17026/dans-xpm-jv9e
title: The Impact of Rural Migrants' Urban Integration Level on Their Farmland Transfer Behavior Under the Background of Family Migration

description: Since the reform and opening up, hundreds of millions of rural migrants have been moving into the city to engage in non-agricultural employment due to the growing gap between urban and rural areas. After more than 40 years of migration between urban and rural areas, the migration pattern of rural migrants has gradually changed from "moving alone" into "moving with family members". Family-oriented migration, therefore has become the main mode of population migration in China, leading to significant structural changes regarding their living strategies and urban integration process in destination cities. The transfer of a large number of rural labor force to cities can effectively alleviate the contradiction of "more people and less land" in rural China, can promote land circulation and promote large-scale farming activities. However, in reality migrant workers face various personal and institutional obstacles during their integration into the cities. For instance, they are more often low-income social groups and have to bear the cost life in cities. Also, inequality regarding urban welfare systems makes it difficult for their family members to gain accessibility to equal educational, housing, social and medical welfares. These facts also affect their decision making on farmland transfer, even the majority of them no longer engage in farming activities. Therefore, under the background of family-oriented mobility, it is of great significance to explore the influence of migrant workers' urban integration level on their farmland transfer behavior, if further increase on farmland transfer rate in China is needed.Based on the push and pull theory, farmer's rationality hypothesis and new migration economic theory, this paper summarizes the relevant literature research results and construct a conceptual framework to explain influence mechanism of rural migrants’ urban integration level on their farmland transfer behavior under the background of family-oriented migration. From the empirical analysis, combined with the survey of 2017 Chinese rural-urban population flow (RUMiC) in 15 cities and 1033 samples data, the research conducted the following studies. First, using principal component analysis (pca) method. The research measured rural migrant family members’ urban integration level by decomposing it from the economic social and psychological dimension. Second, the Logit econometric model is constructed to empirically test the impact of rural migrants family members urban integration level and its related three dimension (economic, social and psychological) on their farmland transfer behavior. It further compared the influential differences of the three dimensions on the behavior. The results show that the urban integration level of the family members has a significant positive impact on their farmland transfer behavior. Specifically, both the economic and psychological integration level of rural migrants family members have a significant impact on the behavior of farmland transfer, while that of the social integration is not significant. In addition, the economic integration level of rural migrant family members has a greater impact on the decision-making of their farmland transfer than the social integration level and psychological integration level. Based on the aforementioned results, this research suggested to strengthen related institutional and socioeconomic supports for the integration of rural migrant workers and their family members and to reduce their dependence on farm land and related farming activities, which would help to promote their urban integration level. To make them to settle down in destination cities and to increase the productivity of farming activities.