Research On The Influence Of Air Pollution On Labor Mobility In China

With global warming,air quality deterioration and other environmental problems increasingly becoming the great challenges in the current society,the pull effect of urban quality air environment on the labor force is gradually emerging.With the intensification of labor mobility and the improvement of the demand for quality of life,labor even choose to "vote with their feet" to escape from areas with poor air to avoid the negative impact of air pollution.The "driving effect" of the environment makes workers no longer simply pursue economic benefits to move.Therefore,when analyzing the traditional theoretical framework of labor mobility,considering environmental factors,labor force and urban heterogeneity characteristics,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to construct a migration decision-making model of air pollution on labor mobility and explore its mechanism for accurately understanding labor mobility behavior.Firstly,this paper reviews domestic and foreign scholars’ literature on air pollution and labor mobility.On the basis of labor mobility theory and heterogeneous labor location choice theory,this paper introduces human capital variable into Romer model to construct a decision-making model of air pollution on labor mobility across regions.Then,the spatial visualization analysis method and the change trend chart were used to describe the fact and analyze the correlation between the change of air pollution and the dynamic change of labor flow in China’s prefecture-level cities,and find out the dynamic change rule between labor flow and air pollution.The results show that the PM2.5 emissions of all provinces in China showed a sharp decrease trend,the heavily polluted areas are clustered around the Bohai Rim region in 2017.The "Matthew effect" of population migration makes the shortage of labor in the less developed areas such as the central and western regions more serious,and the flow of labor to the southeast becomes more and more obvious.In this paper,the multi-level nested Logit regression model is used to estimate the relationship between air pollution and labor mobility,and the macro and micro data are systematically combined to investigate the relationship between air pollution and labor mobility,so as to avoid the endogeneity problem to some extent.Urban heterogeneity and labor heterogeneity are taken into account in the analysis framework to provide empirical evidence of large sample for related studies on labor mobility.In the empirical analysis of the impact of air pollution on labor mobility,it is found that the impact of air pollution on labor mobility has a significant negative correlation.When the average PM2.5concentration increases by 1μg/m3,the probability of labor mobility across regions decreases by 2%.The labors who over 45 years old or those with low-skilled or agricultural residency have a strong demand for good air quality and are more sensitive to PM2.5.The labor force is not sensitive to the air pollution problems in cities characterized by "high-level economic development,high-level administrative level,high-level medical care and education",and the compensation effect of supporting services on the labor force is greater than the negative effect of air pollution.Finally,the mechanism test shows that individual health,happiness and economic benefits after migration have a significant mediating effect between air pollution and labor mobility.At present,various cities are scrambling to put forward talent introduction plans to attract labor force by greatly increasing income and welfare benefits,but the demand of labor force for air quality and urban livability should not be ignored.The main policy recommendations of this paper are as follows:(1)Pay attention to air pollution and strive to create a clean-living environment;(2)Establish environmental health protection system and attach importance to health protection work;(3)Ensure the survival of low socio-economic groups and avoid falling into the trap of environmental poverty;(4)Perfecting regional elements of cities of different levels to achieve balanced labor flow.