Scheffel, J orcid.org/0000-0001-9932-5881 and Zhang, Y (2019) How does internal migration affect the emotional health of elderly parents left-behind? Journal of Population Economics, 32 (3). pp. 953-980. ISSN 0933-1433
Abstract
The ageing population resulting from the one-child policy and massive flows of internal migration in China pose major challenges to elderly care in rural areas where elderly support is based on a traditional inter-generational family support mechanism. We use data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to examine how migration of an adult child affects the emotional health of elderly parents left-behind. We identify the effects using fixed effects and IV approaches which rely on different sources of variation. We find that migration reduces happiness by 6.6 percentage points and leads to a 3.3 percentage points higher probability of loneliness. CES-D scores of elderly parents are severely increased pushing average scores close to the cut-off indicating clinical levels of depressive symptoms. As emotional health is a key determinant of the overall health status, our findings have significant impacts on economic development in China.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018, The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Internal migration; China; Mental health; Elderly parents; Left-behind |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Economics Division (LUBS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Jul 2018 09:52 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 21:25 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s00148-018-0715-y |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:132982 |
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