Mary-Françoise Renard, University Clermont Auvergne: The topic of this paper is the impact of low-skilled immigrants on local labor outcome and how low-skilled immigrants affect local labor participation and wages.
It is a crucial challenge for political as well as economic reasons, and not only in China. There are more and more reasons for migration: wars, political conflicts, poverty, climate change… . In the case of China, the growing urbanization rate is one of the main vectors of this phenomenon.
From an economic point of view, the acceptance or rejection of migrants mainly relies on their impact on labor and wages.
Most studies focus on migrants without any distinction and the originality of this paper is to focus on non-skilled-workers. It is important mainly for two reasons: (1) skill characteristics determine the degree of substitution or complementarity between migrants and locals; and (2) in the face of increasing competition, local...