Author: Scott Rozelle, Li Guo, Minggao Shen, Amelia Hughart, John Giles.

One of the striking outcomes of China's economic reforms is the emergence of inter-regional labour markets as rural workers have poured into the nation's urban and rural economies. Policy makers in China, as elsewhere in the world, have treated the inter-regional migrant labour force with ambiguity. Migration may increase efficiency, contribute to poverty reduction and make China's economy more competitive, but leaders fear the congestion, social unrest and loss of political control which might accompany an increasingly mobile labour force.