Different Roles of Land in Rural-Urban Migration:Evidence from China’s Household Survey

This paper explores the influence of land holding on rural-urban migration using China’s2008 household survey data.It shows that the contradictory findings of existing published literature can be explained by introducing a migration distance variable.The empirical studies show that land holding plays a different role in short-distance and long-distance migration.Land holding has a U-shaped curve association with the probability of shortdistance migration and has an inverted-U-shaped association with the probability of long-distance migration.Therefore,the government needs to provide more job information and migration subsidies to farmers who have little land to overcome difficulties in the process of migration so as to reduce rural-urban inequality.