Beyond Income Gains: Rural Labor Migration and Household Poverty Vulnerability in China

As China’s rural poverty governance shifts from eliminating absolute poverty to preventing relative poverty risks, the sustainability of rural household livelihoods increasingly depends on whether labor migration can strengthen long-term welfare resilience beyond short-term income gains. Existing studies have extensively examined the effects of migration on income, employment, and current poverty status but have paid insufficient attention to whether migration reduces households’ future exposure to poverty. This study reframes rural labor migration as a household-level risk-restructuring strategy and examines its relationship with household poverty and vulnerability. Using rural household data from the 2022 China Family Panel Studies, we construct a Vulnerability as Expected Poverty measure to estimate the probability that household income will fall below a relative poverty line. We then examine the baseline association between the migrant worker share and poverty vulnerability, its heterogeneity across household structures, and the accompanying pathways related to income composition, information access, and asset-based buffering. The results show that a higher migrant worker share is negatively associated with poverty vulnerability in the baseline sample, but this relationship is conditional rather than homogeneous. The negative association is more evident among households with lower household-head education, lighter elderly dependency burden, and moderate labor-allocation constraints. Further evidence shows that migrant households tend to have a higher wage-income share, better internet access, and greater durable asset holdings, all of which are associated with lower vulnerability. By distinguishing income improvement from poverty-risk reduction, this study advances a vulnerability-based framework for evaluating rural migration and highlights that its contribution to sustainable poverty prevention depends on households’ capacity to convert migration-related gains into stable income structures, improved information access, and stronger asset buffers.