Participants held discussions on six topics: basic healthcare and family planning services for the migrant population, new urbanization and migrant population’s transfer to urban residents, new trends of population migration in the world, new trends of population migration in China, social cohesion of the migrant population, and the economic consequences of population migration. They also exchanged their ideas over how to further use and develop monitoring data of the migrant population; how to make full use of the data of the migrant population in decision-making, social management, public services and scientific research; and how to effectively promote migrant population social cohesion during the process of new urbanization.

Wang Pei’an, vice-minister of the NHFPC, delivered a keynote speech during the forum. He introduced the NHFPC’s key research projects on migrant population monitoring and urbanization, as well as social cohesion of the migrant population. He also proposed to deepen social and economic policy research for the migrant population, as well as focus on key problems and urgent issues in migrant population management, thus providing support for decision-makers.

Related departments and scholars should together promote the practice of migrant population social cohesion, conduct evaluation analysis on related policy results, improve research on migrant population social cohesion theory and policy, and promote innovation of migrant population management mechanisms, he said.

Wang proposed that it should further promote the development and sharing of migrant population data. He hoped that related departments could enhance cooperation to actively exchange the data of migrant populations, which will further set up a long-term working mechanism, promote the application and development of information resources, and step up the combination of modern information technology and migrant population management.

The NHFPC paid close attention to service management for the migrant population and has established a statistics collecting system for the migrant population, whole population databases and monitoring systems at both State and provincial levels. So far, the work of statistics collection and monitoring has been conducted for five years, playing an indispensable role in investigating, learning trends, evaluating performance, policy research and promoting related work.