Retention of the highly educated migrants: From the perspective of urban e-service capability

China’s e-government construction continues to accelerate, but little attention has been paid to whether the highly educated talents would be attracted by the high-quality public services. This article evaluates the urban e-government service and other factors in attracting the new-generation of highly educated migrants for the first time by using the China Migrants Dynamic Survey in 2017 and the data from the Evaluation Report of Government E-service Capability Index (2017). The results show that a city with better e-service capability is highly attractive to the high-educated talents and makes them have strong settlement intention, the highly educated migrants who are female, married, and from non-agricultural areas have stronger urban-settlement intention because of having stricter requirements of urban e-service capability. This research demonstrates the importance of the urban e-public services on retaining the new-generation of highly educated migrants.