Economic growth and socioeconomic changes have transformed nearly every aspect of childhood in China, and many are worried by the increasing prevalence of mental health issues among children, particularly depression. To provide insight into the distribution of depressive symptoms among children in China and identify vulnerable groups, we use data from the 2012 China Family Panel Survey (CFPS), a survey that collected data from a large, nationally representative sample of the Chinese population. Using the CFPS data, we construct a sample of 2679 children aged 10–15 years old from 25 provinces in China. According to our results, the incidence of depression varies by geographic area. Specifically, we find that rates of depressive symptoms are significantly lower in urban areas (14% of sample children) than in rural areas (23% of sample children). Our results also show that children from ethnic minorities, from poorer families, and whose parents are depressed are more likely to be depressed than other children. In contrast, we find that depressive symptoms do not vary by gender.

China’s rapid urbanization in the past several decades have been accompanied by rural labor migration. An important question that has emerged is whether rural labor migration has a positive or negative impact on the depressive symptoms of children left behind in the countryside by their migrating parents. This paper uses a nationally representative panel dataset to investigate whether parental migration impacts the prevalence of depressive symptoms among left-behind children in China. Using DID and PSM-DID methods, our results show that parental migration significantly increases the depression scores of 10 and 11-year-old children by 2 points using the CES-D depression scale. Furthermore, we also find that the negative effect of decreased parental care is stronger than the positive effect of increased income in terms of determining the depressive symptoms status of children in rural China.

In China, due to decades of the ‘one-child policy’ and continuous rural-urban labour migration, real population aging in rural areas is increasing more quickly than in urban areas, and the labour inputs in agricultural production are becoming ever more dependent on the elderly. Using CHARLS data, we examine the effect of health on the labour supply of rural elderly people. We construct a latent health stock index (LHSI) to eliminate measurement bias and then use this one-period lagged LHSI and the Heckman two-stage and the Bourguignon-Fournier-Gurand two-stage method to deal with the simultaneous causality of health and labour decisions and sample selectivity in model estimation. The results show that, in the overall level, the labour force participation and work time of rural elderly people increase significantly with the improvement of health. These effects on the males are sharply greater than on the females and are enhanced with age. In the subdivided agricultural and non-agricultural labour supply, health improvement is positively related with labour force participation of rural elderly and brings an employment allocation from agricultural section to non-agricultural section, especially on the males. However, as the work time, these relations are insignificant and invariant with gender and age.

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