Chinese people deeply worry about the inter-generational immobility among the social strata, and attribute it to the marketization reform subjectively. Therefore, a study on the contribution of marketization reform to the inter-generational mobility would enrich the evaluation of the extensive effect of marketization reform on China’s economy and society, and ascertain the trend of inter-generational mobility in China. However, current literature just indirectly infers the effect of the marketization reform from the measurement of intergenerational mobility level, but does not estimate its effect directly. This paper combines the CGSS data with the market index and forms a pooled cross-sectional data, to directly estimate the effect of marketization reform on the inter-generational mobility. The empirical results demonstrate that there is significant inter-generational inheritance in China’s families, and the inter-generational regression coefficient is 0.12. However, the marketization reform that happened in China from 2008 to 2012 has played a significantly negative adjustment role in the elder generations’ power on their children, which reduces by 0.8% on average. The evidence indicates that the marketization reform actually promotes the inter-generational mobility in China, and could not be owed to the immobility among China’s social strata. After the robustness test by using MLMV estimation, and two-level nested structural equation models, the above results are also dovious. Moreover, much small regression coefficient of the market index also discloses that the adjustment effect of the marketization reform is still not strong. This discovery illustrates that China should insist on and further deepen current marketization reform, and promote the mobility of the production factors and labor force. This should also be the right development direction in the future. And the Chinese governments should promote the reform of income distribution, provide basic public services, abolish the obstacles to labor mobility, create a fair and just competition environment, and produce much more chances for up-ward mobility. The main contribution of this paper lies in that it creates a new analysis angle for the study of inter-generational mobility. The empirical results also provide much new evidence for the theory of marketization reform, social mobility, inter-generation unfairness, etc. It confirms the positive effect of China’s marketization reform, and also helps to classify the real change trends of China’s inter-generational mobility from a brand-new angel. The topic discussed in this paper could be carried forward at least in two ways. The first is to test much longer dynamic effect of marketization reform on the inter-generational mobility by using more periods of data. The second is to further test the effect of different sections of the market index one by one, exploring the function mechanism and its weakness of the marketization system.
/ Journals / Journal of Finance and Economics
Journal of Finance and Economics
LiuYuanchun, Editor-in-Chief
ZhengChunrong, Vice Executive Editor-in-Chief
YaoLan BaoXiaohua HuangJun, Vice Editor-in-Chief
The Contribution of Marketization Reform Process to the Inter-generational Mobility in China
Journal of Finance and Economics Vol. 44, Issue 01, pp. 128 - 141 (2018) DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.2018.01.010
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Cite this article
Yang Yi’nan. The Contribution of Marketization Reform Process to the Inter-generational Mobility in China[J]. Journal of Finance and Economics, 2018, 44(1): 128–141.
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