Heterogeneous Impact of Social Integration on the Health of Rural-to-Urban Migrants in China

by Haiyang Lu¹,Ivan T. Kandilov² and Peng Nie ^3,4,*

¹Institute of Western China Economic Research, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 610074, China

²Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA

³School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710061, China

⁴Institute for Health Care & Public Management, University of Hohenheim, 70599 Stuttgart, Germany

^*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Abstract

Background: While several studies have found that lower levels of social integration may lead to a deterioration in the health status of migrants, previous research on the nexus between social integration and health has generally ignored the potential endogeneity of social integration. This paper examines the heterogeneous impact of social integration on the health of rural-to-urban migrants in China by exploiting plausibly exogenous, long-term, geographic variation in dialectal diversity. Methods: Drawing on nationally representative data from the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey (n = 117,446), we first regressed self-reported health on social integration using ordinary least squares estimation and then used an ordered probit model as a robustness check. Additionally, to rule out the potential endogeneity of social integration, we relied mainly on an instrumental variable approach and used dialectal diversity as a source of exogenous variation for social integration. Results: We found that social integration has a significant positive impact on rural-to-urban migrants’ health. We also detected considerable heterogeneity in the effects of social integration across gender, generation, and wage levels: the health status of women, more recent generation migrants, and migrants with wages in the middle of wage distribution are more likely to be affected by social integration. Conclusions: We confirmed the beneficial impact of social integration on migrants’ health, which has some important policy implications. Successful migration policies should take the fundamental issue of migrants’ social integration into account. 

Keywords: social integration; health; dialectal diversity; internal migration; China; heterogeneous effects

Weblink: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/16/9999