| Abstract: |
Although a significant wage gap has been found in many previous studies
between urban workers and rural migrants in Chinese cities, it is still not
clear how such a wage gap may evolve over time. This paper uses both a dynamic
wage decomposition method and economic assimilation model with pooled
cross-sectional data from the China Household Income Project Survey (CHIPS) of
1999 and 2002 to investigate the change in the wage gap between urban workers
and rural migrants over time and its determinants in Chinese cities. The
estimation results show that (1) there is a widening on-average wage gap
between urban workers and rural migrants across the two surveyed years in
Chinese cities, mainly caused by the decline in the return to education for
rural migrants; (2) rural migrants can catch up with the wage level of their
urban counterparts as the time they reside in the host cities increases, but
because of the decline in the speed of catching-up over time, rural migrants
cannot obtain wages comparable totheir urban counterparts in their life time,
and more importantly well-educated rural migrants do not seem to have a
significant advantage in this wage assimilation process than the
lowlypoorly-educated ones. Both findings suggest that there might be
discrimination against well-educated rural migrants which prevents them from
obtaining a fair wage in the Chinese urban labour market. |