remain the top five destination provinces for migrants who moved across province boundaries during this period. All these destinations, except Beijing, are located in coastal and eastern regions.

A policy response to regional inequality, the Western Development Project, which started in 2000, directed substantial public investment to western and inland regions (Naughton 2004). With more investment and more employment opportunities, China’s western and interior regions also experienced a rise in the migrant population during the first decade of the 21st century (Liang, et al. 2014). For more recent trends, the RCRE data show that Guangdong, Hubei, Shannxi, Liaoning, and Jiangxi have experienced the largest intra-provincial migration movements over the period 2009-2017. In sum, the coastal and eastern regions remain the major destinations for inter-provincial migrants, while the increase in the migrant population in the central and western regions seems to be driven predominantly by intraprovincial migrants.

With increases in rural-to-urban migration, we also observe important demographic features of the migrant population, some of which have undergone notable changes over time. First, migration trends differ by gender and age.<sup>8</sup> As shown in Figure 2, the likelihood of working as a migrant increase with age, peaks for cohorts aged 25 to 30, and then decreases with age. Below age 70, a larger share of rural men migrate than women. The gender gap in the migrant share of the local population remains stable with no sign of converging over time.<sup>9</sup> Even though this broad gender and age pattern has been consistent for years, a couple of important changes are notable in the RCRE data. First, migration at younger ages (1620) has declined for both men and women, and the decline is more pronounced for women. One possible explanation is that a higher proportion of people in this age group are in school in later years, rather than in the labor market (Figure 3). In 2003, about one-third of young women and 35% of young men in this age group were in school, compared to 64.5% of young women and 59% of young men in 2013.<sup>10</sup> Based on data from the micro-census, the share of 15-17 year olds in rural areas with some upper secondary attainment increased from 43% in 2005 to 70% in 2015 (Wang et al. 2019). This school attendance expansion may be partly attributed to a supply factor: the consistent government policy priority over a decade to promote vocational education and training (VET) in upper secondary education. Even though

> 8 Similar gender and age patterns in migration trends, as shown in Figure 2, have been observed in an early time period (1995-2003) (Giles and Mu, 2018) and with an alternative data source (Mu and van de Walle 2011). 9When we use a 10% sample of the 2017 RCRE household data and the rural sample of the 2018 CFPS data to examine the age and gender specific migration rate (Appendix Figure A1), we see a similar pattern overall, but the migration rate of the younger age group in the RCRE sample is distinctly lower than that in the CFPS sample. 10According to CFPS 2018, the school enrollment rate for the 16-20 age group is 74.8% for women and 68.5% for men in the rural areas. The respective numbers seen in the 10% sample from 2017 RCRE data are 76.8%, and 70.7%.

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