Information Transmission Mechanism of Inequality of Opportunity and Effort on Settlement Intention

Abstract

China is promoting sustainable economic development through urbanisation, but migrants’ low settlement intention has become an obstacle to the urbanisation process. The key leading to this problem is that the current economic system lacks an index with high information transparency to convey the characteristics of the destination city, so that migrants’ choice of settling city is a kind of act of chance. By referring to Roemer’s equality of opportunity theory, this paper takes the indexes of inequality of opportunity (IO) and inequality of effort (IE) of the destination as market signals representing the characteristics information of destination, innovatively proposes an information transmission mechanism to improve migrants’ settlement intention. According to the IO and IE of the destination, migrants can effectively identify the economic incentive modes and social characteristics of the destination city before migration, and then make an accurate judgment on the possibility of realizing income growth and social integration in the destination. The feasibility of this mechanism was verified by the data of China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS). The result indicates that IO and IE can indeed convey information about economic incentives of the destination and attract migrants to settle down there. In addition, IE can convey positive messages on two social characteristics of the destination, namely, promotion fairness and social network, while IO sends negative messages on both aspects. Cities that plan to expand their population scale can leverage this mechanism to optimise their IO and IE indexes, so as to attract migrants to settle down in the city.