IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/dur/durham/2025_03.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Entrepreneurship, Economy and Inequality: Evidence from China’s Return-Home Policy

Author

Listed:
  • Liu Cui

    (Zhejiang University)

  • Yit Wey Liew

    (Sunway University)

  • Muhammad Habibur Rahman

    (Durham University)

Abstract

This study examines the economic and distributional effects of China’s National Pilot Program for Returnee Entrepreneurship, which encourages rural migrants to return to their hometowns for business creation and employment. Drawing on county-level socioeconomic indicators and nationally representative household survey data, we find that the program substantially boosted local economic development. Yet the gains were uneven as household-level analysis reveals a significant rise in within-county inequality. The mechanism operates through unequal access to capital, skills, and risk tolerance, enabling better-endowed households to capture a disproportionate share of the benefits. These findings underscore a key policy trade-off: while returnee entrepreneurship initiatives can stimulate aggregate growth, they may simultaneously exacerbate disparities within rural communities

Suggested Citation

  • Liu Cui & Yit Wey Liew & Muhammad Habibur Rahman, 2025. "Entrepreneurship, Economy and Inequality: Evidence from China’s Return-Home Policy," Department of Economics Working Papers 2025_03, Durham University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:dur:durham:2025_03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.durham.ac.uk/business/media/durham-university-business-school/about-us/departments/economics-and-finance/working-papers-pdfs/EconWP25_03.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • L26 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Entrepreneurship

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dur:durham:2025_03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tatiana Damjanovic (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deduruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.