The Impact of Basic Public Health Services on Migrant Peasant Workers’ Urban Integration: Evidence from China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for your interesting research. I really enjoy reading the paper. The authors have done a lot of work and the manuscript in its present form is of great quality. However, the paper is not ready for publication unless several major issues are fixed or clarified. Here are my comments:
1. Please add a Section, named Hypothesis Development.
2. Please add Notation part and use well-defined variable names in the rest of the paper.
3. Endogeneity issue. The basic public health program is not only implemented in urban area and city, but in rural area. I doubt basic public health service has a positive effect on integration of migrant peasant workers. It is more likely that migrant peasant workers who are more willing and capable to integrate have more knowledge and information on how to establish a health profile.
4. Independent variable. Establishment of a health record is not implying availability or quality of basic health service. It is more likely that in urban area or city workers are close to knowledge and information of a health record.
Moreover, the paper runs regression at individual level where a health record is considered as an independent variable. It is hard to understand why the proportion of a health record is considered as an IV at the district level.
What is more, health records are defined as a 0-1 variable, so what are the meanings of coefficients of health records in Table 2 (for example, 4.169 in model 1)?
5. Control variable. The paper has too many control variable. Please clarify multicollinearity issue.
Author Response
Dear reviewers,
We gratefully thank the editor and all reviewers for their time spent making constructive remarks and valuable suggestions, which have significantly improved the quality of the manuscript. We have studied all comments carefully and have made conscientious corrections. The primary corrections in the paper and the responses to the reviewers’ comments are as follows.
Overall, we have made several major revisions.
- we have adjusted the article's structure by adding a discussion section (section 4) and a review of the relevant literature in the introduction, considering several reviewers' comments, making the whole article clearer.
- In the empirical section, we added a description of the selection of instrumental variables and performed a multicollinearity test. The conclusions are consistent with the original results.
- the content was again optimized in the abstract, results, and conclusion to make the article more readable and acceptable.
- we have carefully checked and improved the English writing and asked a well-established expert to polish the revised manuscript.
Furthermore, we would like to show the details as follows.
Reviewer 1#
Q1. Please add a Section, named Hypothesis Development.
Response: We gratefully appreciate for your comment. The revised version adds a relevant literature review in the introduction section, analyzing the research progress and some representative views in related fields.
Q2. Please add Notation part and use well-defined variable names in the rest of the paper.
Response: We have added variable definitions and unified usage in the paper from beginning to end.
Q3. Endogeneity issue. The basic public health program is not only implemented in urban area and city, but in rural area.
Response: According to possible endogenous problems, we select instrumental variables for endogenous test.
Q4. Independent variable. Establishment of a health record is not implying availability or quality of basic health service. It is more likely that in urban area or city workers are close to knowledge and information of a health record. Moreover, the paper runs regression at individual level where a health record is considered as an independent variable. It is hard to understand why the proportion of a health record is considered as an IV at the district level. What is more, health records are defined as a 0-1 variable, so what are the meanings of coefficients of health records in Table 2 (for example, 4.169 in model 1)?
Response: (1) Some research pointed out that in the implementation of basic public health projects, the establishment of health archives is considered to be the premise of providing basic public health services. For example, the following two recent articles. We also cited in our study.
Zhou, Z.; Jiang, Y.; Wu, H.; Jiang, F.; Yu, Z. The Age of Mobility: Can Equalization of Public Health Services Alleviate the Poverty of Migrant Workers? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2022, 19, 13342.
Yuan, H.B.; Deng, H.L. The impact of basic public health services on the health of floating population - empirical analysis based on CMDS2018 data. Social Scientist,. 2021. 8, 104-107+112.(In Chinese)
In Yuan’s research, he used "Have you established a health record for your local area?" as a proxy variable for basic public health services, and our paper referred to their practice and make further supplements.
(2) The extracted factor of the dependent variable urban integration is normalized to 0~100, so the coefficient 4.169 means that the establishment of health records will improve the urban integration level of rural migrant population by 4.169 points.We have also supplemented this part.
(3) Added description of reasons for selecting tool variables. The instrumental variables should meet the requirements of relevance and externality, among which the relevance requires that the instrumental variables are related to whether the rural floating population has established archives, and the externality requires that the instrumental variables cannot directly affect the urban integration of the rural floating population. Some studies have pointed out that when studying micro individuals, the higher level of interpretation can be changed as instrumental variables (such as county level, community level, village level, etc.). Therefore, this study uses the proportion of rural migrant population with health records established at the county level as a tool variable. The reason for meeting the relevant conditions is that the individual's filing decision will be affected by the surrounding filing situation, and the reason for meeting the exogenous conditions is that the filing situation of other rural migrant population in the rural migrant population's own district and county will not have a direct impact on their own social integration, so this instrumental variable meets the requirements of both relevance and exogenous, that is, IV is related to the core explanatory variable, but not directly related to the explained variable.
Q5. Control variable. The paper has too many control variable. Please clarify multicollinearity issue.
Response: The average VIF value is 4.72, which is less than 10. It can be considered that there is no multicollinearity in the selection of control variables in this paper.We also add it in section 3.1.
Best Regards.
Dr. Li
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The article entitled “Study on the Impact of Basic Public Health Services on the Urban Integration of Migrant Peasant Workers—Evidence from China" proposed good aim and method; however, the research problem and gap need to be clarified. I have several issues that have to be addressed before the manuscript can be further evaluated for publication:
- Abstract:
The abstract presents a greet and deep description of your work, but the research problem is not clear.
- Introduction:
- The literature review and findings of similar studies should be provided.
Results
- The main results should be clarify in charts.
- Conclusion:
• This part presents a greet sections, but the authors should add more results and proposed promising applications and limitations. In addition, suggestions parts and their subtitles need to move to discussion part.
Author Response
Dear Renee and reviewers,
We gratefully thank the editor and all reviewers for their time spent making constructive remarks and valuable suggestions, which have significantly improved the quality of the manuscript. We have studied all comments carefully and have made conscientious corrections. The primary corrections in the paper and the responses to the reviewers’ comments are as follows.
Overall, we have made several major revisions.
- we have adjusted the article's structure by adding a discussion section (section 4) and a review of the relevant literature in the introduction, considering several reviewers' comments, making the whole article clearer.
- In the empirical section, we added a description of the selection of instrumental variables and performed a multicollinearity test. The conclusions are consistent with the original results.
- the content was again optimized in the abstract, results, and conclusion to make the article more readable and acceptable.
- we have carefully checked and improved the English writing and asked a well-established expert to polish the revised manuscript.
Furthermore, we would like to show the details as follows.
Reviewer 2#
Q1. Abstract: The abstract presents a greet and deep description of your work, but the research problem is not clear.
Q2. Introduction: The literature review and findings of similar studies should be provided.
Response: Thank you for your precious comments and advice. As mentioned at the beginning, the content was again optimized in the abstract, results, and conclusion to make the article more readable and acceptable.
Q3. Results：The main results should be clarify in charts.
Response: We have added statements in the relevant part throughout the text.
Q4. Conclusion: This part presents a greet sections, but the authors should add more results and proposed promising applications and limitations. In addition, suggestions parts and their subtitles need to move to discussion part.
Response: We have added a discussion part (in section 4) to clarify and follow your concerns. We proposed a broader application prospect in the part of conclusions and policy recommendations.
Best Regards.
Dr. Li
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewers,
We gratefully thank the editor and all reviewers for their time spent making constructive remarks and valuable suggestions, which have significantly improved the quality of the manuscript. We have studied all comments carefully and have made conscientious corrections. The primary corrections in the paper and the responses to the reviewers’ comments are as follows.
Overall, we have made several major revisions.
- we have adjusted the article's structure by adding a discussion section (section 4) and a review of the relevant literature in the introduction, considering several reviewers' comments, making the whole article clearer.
- In the empirical section, we added a description of the selection of instrumental variables and performed a multicollinearity test. The conclusions are consistent with the original results.
- the content was again optimized in the abstract, results, and conclusion to make the article more readable and acceptable.
- we have carefully checked and improved the English writing and asked a well-established expert to polish the revised manuscript.
Furthermore, we would like to show the details as follows.
Reviewer 3#
Q1. The title should be more unmistakable and simultaneously clear-cut.
Response: Thanks for all your efforts to make this paper the best it can be. We have modified the title “The Impact of Basic Public Health Services on the Migrant Peasant Workers’ Urban Integration in China.”
Q2. In the part of the introduction, issues such as inaccurate arguments (the book of Michel Foucault), vague pronouns, and the lack of a clear definition of "universal health coverage" were cited.
Response: We deeply appreciate the reviewer’s suggestion. As mentioned at the beginning, we reshaped the whole introduction according to the proposals mentioned above. It is necessary to clarify that the concept of universal health coverage in the paper remains the same as that of WHO, which we have quoted here.
Q3. Data, variables and models present in part two of the paper. It is understood that data are mainly from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey. But what was the method of sampling? Information that through data selection and cleaning this paper/ sic!/ obtains 107 213 individual microdata of the rural mobile population is not enough.
Response: we have added more detailed CMDS information, including sampling method. The expression of data selection and cleaning is also further modified.
Q4. Regarding table one on statistical Description, I think the necessary descriptive information should be appropriately put.
Response: We have added variable definitions and also unified usage in the paper from beginning to end.
Q5. The authors planned to study the relationship between access to health services and integration. So far as I understand the psychological integration. But it is not clear enough. The measure of integration there is five questions as the proxy variables. It can be like this. But how do these five questions evaluate the integration? How is PCA used? Etc. It is not necessary to give the complete Description of, let's it be, PCA but to give the information about what so and so has meant.
Response: we have added statement in 2.2.1. Specifically, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method is used for the explained variables. The principal component analysis system automatically extracts a factor with a characteristic root greater than 1 and tests the adaptability of factor analysis. The extracted factor variance contribution rate is 60.59%, and the KMO is 0.8282, so it is considered suitable for factor analysis. Meanwhile, we referred to Dong and He (2022) to standardize the extracted factors to 0-100 to facilitate comparison of the independent variable coefficients, and the transformed cities are integrated into continuous variables.
Q6. It is a common disease among "quantitative leaned" researchers who prepare papers with horrible amounts of tables, equations, models, etc. But what about general understanding?
Response: We have taken full advantage of the specified three references and optimized the full-text presentation to make the paper more readable and acceptable.
Q7. It could be worthwhile to consider the structure of the paper:
- Introduction./Description of the problem with clear-cut aims./
b.Methods /again clear Description of it/
c.Results
d.Comments/ discution/
e.Conclusions and recommendations
Response: we have adjusted the article's structure by adding a discussion section (section 4) and a review of the relevant literature in the introduction, considering several reviewers' comments, making the whole article clearer.
Q8. In the end, the text should be evaluated by the native speaker.
Response: We are sorry that our research is not more readable due to non-native language. we have carefully checked and improved the English writing and asked a native speaker to polish the revised manuscript.
Thanks again to the reviewers for their positive and constructive comments on our article. Thanks a lot for all editors' and reviewers' efforts to make this paper the best it can be. We look forward to hearing from you.
Best Regards.
Dr. Li
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thanks for your efforts of careful revisions and detailed response. The paper in present form is of good quality and ready for publication. I suggest Accept or minor revisions and leave it to editor's discretion.
My comments are including:
1.The paper is a typical econometric paper. So, I like the original title form "The impact of X on Y: Evidence from Z" and please add a separate part called Hypothesis Development as I request in my last report.
2. Also, as I request in my last report, please add a separate part called Notation. Variable names should be shorter and in italic font. Besides, formula 1 and 2 are not tidy and please revise them.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
