Youth education and learning in 21st century China: Disentangling the impacts of migration, residence and Hukou

Child development is an important predictor of later life course achievements including academic and labour market success, and in recent years increasing attention has focused on the relationship between child development and life course trajectories in low and middle-income countries. This study uses data from the first wave of the Chinese Family Panel Study (CFPS) collected in 2010 to examine the relationship between parental labour migration and educational outcomes for youth. The historically uneven development across China has contributed to differentials between the urban and rural populations. Labour migration may contribute to decreasing these inequalities. The paper examines the contribution of parental labour migration to explaining variation in three educational outcomes, school pacing, math and verbal achievement. Multivariate regression models are estimated to examine the contribution of individual, household and community characteristics to explaining variation in the outcomes measures highlight the relationships between migration, residence and Hukou. First, the urban Hukou advantage is not universal with observed differences only for language scores. Second, youth living in rural households with one or more migrant parents are more likely to have higher math scores compared to youth in other rural households.