Urban bias, migration control and rural land policy: the case of Hukou in China
构建政治经济学模型，分析城市化与城市生产率如何影响政府在农村土地改革和城乡迁移政策上的权衡，并用中国户籍制度验证模型预测。
Abstract Urban-biased politics often drives distortionary policies in many countries. We develop a political economy model in which the government faces a trade-off between retaining urban support and expanding its industrial rent base. The model shows that while an increase in urbanization strengthens the government’s incentives to adopt rural land reform and to encourage rural–urban migration, an increase in urban productivity has the opposite effect. These effects are mediated by the income share of labor in the rural sector, the political power of urban residents and the labor elasticity of urban output. Using China’s context, we illustrate that the model’s predictions are consistent with the observed policies on land ownership and rural–urban migration.