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The constraints on migration flows due to the hukou system have important implications for resources allocation in the People’s Republic of China. At the individual level, they act on rural people’s life cycle and on the allocation, not of their labor, but of their capital: if rural laborers, when young, are free to work wherever they wish, older, they are constrained to return to rural areas, and to invest there their savings. At the macroeconomic level, this article shows, through a simple model of a dual economy development with overlapping generations, that these constraints, despite an apparent suboptimality of resources allocation, hasten capital accumulation in China. Classification JEL: J61, O15, O24, P23.