Endnotes

¹Policies leading to the closure of high-pollution businesses in many cities may also have been another contributory factor. Yulin city in Gansu province has reportedly closed 297 highly polluting firms since 2007 (see http://www.gscn.com.cn/get/sx/0810708522783270_60.html).

²The data came from Xiwen Chen, director of the Chinese Communist Party's Office on Rural Policy, during a news conference in Beijing on 2 Feb. 2009.

³Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Nanjing, Wuxi, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, Hefei, Bangbu, Luoyang, and Zhengzhou.

⁴The RUMiCI project is funded by the Australian Research Council, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), and the Ford Foundation.

⁵For detailed information regarding the sampling methodology, see http://rumici.anu.edu.au/.

⁶The 2009 Chinese New Year was on 26 January 2009. Normally migrant workers return to their rural home villages for the Chinese New Year and go back to the cities 15–20 days after the holiday. Our last tracking was therefore conducted after 15 February 2009, at the time most of the migrant workers had gone back to the cities.

⁷The total number of blocks surveyed in 2007 and the number of blocks re-surveyed in 2009 are listed in Appendix A [ PDF 19.2KB | 1 page ].

⁸In normal years businesses may also shut down but new ones will take their place. Our data excluded cases where a new business replaced the old one. Thus, we believe that our data closely reflect the impact of the economic downturn with respect to business shutdowns. Of course, it would be ideal if we could compare the shutdown rate arrived at with our data with observations from a period without the economic downturn. Unfortunately, such data are not available at this point. However, by this time next year, the RUMiCI project should be able to obtain data in a normal economic environment if the PRC economy has recovered by then. If so, we can go back to correct our current estimates.

⁹Of course the global financial crisis has also affected the non–tradable goods sectors, such as real estate and banking. However, the slowdown in those sectors will have limited impact on the employment of rural–urban migrants, as most of the migrants are unskilled.

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