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Housing quality and its determinants in rural China: a structural equation model analysis

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Abstract

Rural residents spend more money on housing than on any other item in their lifetimes in China and housing quality is a crucial determinant of their subjective well-being. Based on the 2010 wave of the China General Social Survey, this paper investigates housing quality and its determinants in rural China. Since housing quality is multi-dimensional and indicated by housing size, construction material, tap water, indoor toilet and indoor kitchen, this paper takes housing quality as a latent variable and applies a structural equation model. Results show that housing inequality and poverty exist in rural China, especially in the central and inland regions. In addition, results suggest that household income, social network, communist party membership, and human capital have significant positive impacts on rural residents’ housing quality while construction cost has negative impacts. Housing-improvement programs should be implemented to assist the poor in improving housing quality.

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Notes

  1. A latent variable cannot be directly observed but can be measured by other observable variables (Jöreskog and Sörbom 1996; Oud and Folmer 2008).

  2. Cadres have been considered in the empirical model. Consistent with Wang et al. (2012a, b), cadres have insignificant impacts on housing quality. Therefore, we removed cadres from the empirical model.

  3. An SEM can handle the latent and observed variables and their relationships within an integrated framework (Jöreskog and Sörbom 1996).

  4. See Jöreskog and Sörbom (1996) for a detailed discussion about the SEM.

  5. The CGSS is a national survey that was administered in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2011 (Bian and Li 2012). More than ten thousand rural and urban residents in mainland China were interviewed in each wave, except in 2003 and 2008, when only urban residents were interviewed. However, only the 2010 wave of the CGSS contains detailed information on the housing characteristics of rural residents. See Bian and Li (2012) for more details about the CGSS.

  6. Since the 2010 wave of the CGSS asked about housing, individual and household characteristics, the 2010 prices of concrete and steel were used in the empirical analysis.

  7. 14.40% of houses were built from concrete and steel in the 1990s (see Yu 2006).

  8. To differentiate the standardized coefficients in the measurement model from those in the structural model, we follow Jöreskog and Sörbom (1996) and use loading other than coefficient to represent the standardized coefficients between indicators and latent variables.

  9. Note that the dataset applied in the empirical analysis shows about 19% of households have communist party members in the dataset. The number is bigger than that reported in the Chinese Communist Party Statistics Bulletin. The reported number is 16%.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Department of Sociology of Renmin University of China and the Social Science Division of Hong Kong Science and Technology University for providing data. The views expressed herein are the authors’ own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, School of Humanities, Economics and Law, Northwestern Polytechnical University, West Youyi Road 127, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Honghao Ren

  2. Department of Investment, School of Finance, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Donghu Road 182, Wuhan, 430073, China

    Nannan Yuan

  3. Economic Research Institute, Peking University, Yiheyuan Road 5, Beijing, 100871, China

    Huimin Hu

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  1. Honghao Ren
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  3. Huimin Hu
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Correspondence to Honghao Ren.

Appendix

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See Table 6.

Table 6 The classification of regions
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Ren, H., Yuan, N. & Hu, H. Housing quality and its determinants in rural China: a structural equation model analysis. J Hous and the Built Environ 34, 313–329 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-018-9629-y

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