Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
1-2026
Abstract
We study how infrastructure shapes rural development using household panel data from a nationally representative sample of Chinese villages, matched to high-resolution highway maps. Reduced-form results show that road expansion between 2000 and 2015 operates mainly through reallocation, with less productive farmers scaling down or exiting and more productive farmers remaining and expanding. We quantify the aggregate and distributional consequences in a dynamic spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous households and endogenous migration. Improved connectivity not only accelerates urbanization, roughly doubling the speed of convergence, but also increases aggregate rural output by 2.2 to 5.3 percent in the long run, even as the rural workforce declines. Policy counterfactuals show that relaxing China’s farmland red line and reallocating land toward more productive areas amplifies these reallocation gains.
Keywords
transportation network, migration, agricultural productivity
Discipline
Agricultural and Resource Economics | Asian Studies | Transportation
Research Areas
Applied Microeconomics
First Page
1
Last Page
80
Identifier
10.2139/ssrn.5381231
Citation
MA, Lin; MEI, Yuan; WU, Qunfeng; and XU, Mingzhi.
Connectivity and Selective Rural Migration. (2026). 1-80.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2873
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5381231
Included in
Agricultural and Resource Economics Commons, Asian Studies Commons, Transportation Commons