Research On The Relationship Between Economic Agglomeration And Industrial Structure Upgrading Based On The Perespective Of Labor Mobility

Since the reform and opening, the industry structure of our country achieved a steady and rapid upgrading, along with the rapid growing of total economy and the continuous accelerating process of urbanization. From the sub regional level observation, policy inclination and location advantages prompted China’s eastern region in taking the lead in development, and exports, foreign capital inflow and large-scale population immigration contributed to regional economic factors agglomerating in the east coastal area. While the differences in regional economic agglomeration gap gradually revealing, the progress of the industrial structure upgrade also varies significantly. Economic agglomeration leads to the demand for labor and the widening income gap and this in turn causes the large-scale labor migrating to the east cross regional, which not only affects the labor supply structure in the inflow and outflow of area, but also expand the gap of regional economic agglomeration degree further.At present, few scholars explain the relationship between economy agglomeration and the upgrading of the industrial structure from labor mobility perspective. So this article first starting from the external effects of economic agglomeration and industrial structure theory, analyses the effect mechanism of the three from the labor force flow perspective and constructs a theoretical model, based on the typical facts of difference in economic agglomeration and industrial structure upgrading. Secondly, we do the empirical research respectively on the relationship between agglomeration economies and the upgrading of the industrial structure, economic agglomeration and labor mobility, labor mobility and the upgrading of the industrial structure connection. Then we analyses the economic agglomeration effect, spatial effect of industrial structure and labor mobility, the mechanism of economic agglomeration attracting labor force flow and the labor impacting on the upgrading of the industrial structure in-depth, in order to construct the logical chain between economic agglomeration, labor mobility and the upgrading of the industrial structure. The conclusion of this research provides a new interpretation for China’s regional economic structure upgrading alienation phenomenon, and will be an important reference to accurately judge the trend of labor mobility and upgrading and layout of China’s regional economic structure, and has important significance to formulate the policy of regional coordinated development in the future.The framework of this study are:The first part explains the research background and significance of the topic, and outlines the research ideas and research content.The second part overviews the theory and literature about the upgrading of industrial structure, economic agglomeration and labor mobility, providing a theoretical groundwork for the further analysis.In the third part, firstly, we compared and summarized the China’s regional economic agglomeration, labor mobility and the upgrading trend of industrial structure, and expounded the relationships and evolution characteristics between the three factors. Secondly, this paper analyze the influence mechanism between economic agglomeration, labor mobility and the upgrading of industrial structure, and proposed the hypothesis, based on the present literature research and the results from analyzing typical examples. Finally, we tried to build a two region economy endogenous growth model containing labor mobility and industry sector vertical associated, to construct a theoretical analysis framework of economic agglomeration affecting the upgrading of industrial structure from the perspective of labor mobility.The fourth part examined the relationship between economic agglomeration and industrial structure upgrading. Firstly we do a static test by constructing ordinary panel model and instrumental variables model, based on inter provincial panel date. Secondly, we constructed a dynamic model to test the relationship between economic agglomeration and industrial structure upgrading, and further investigated the spillover, thus we get the objective evaluation of how economic agglomeration affects the upgrading of industrial structure.The fifth part inspected the effect of economic agglomeration on the labor mobility, based on the conclusion of labor mobility theory. Firstly, we build the static, dynamic and spatial panel model to test it. And secondly, we inspected the policy advantage and industrial conditions of the economic agglomeration regions in attracting labor inflows and inter industry mobility from the two aspects of how the economic agglomeration affects government investment in public service level and the industrial structure rationalization.The sixth part analyzed the effect of labor mobility on the upgrading of regional industrial structure. Firstly, we build the static and spatial panel model to test the relationship between labor mobility and the upgrading of regional industrial structure. Secondly, this article inspected the change of labor structure influencing the industrial structure from the two aspects of labor age structure and culture quality, so as to reveal the inherent mechanism of labor migration effecting on the upgrading of the industrial structure. Finally, this paper constructed a simultaneous equations model to test the overall relationship among economic agglomeration, labor mobility and the upgrading of the industrial structure, and summarized the interaction influence mechanism between the three.The seventh part is the summary of the whole paper. We take a refined conclusion of the whole thesis, proposed our recommendations on the policy about promoting industrial transformation and upgrading, optimizing the national industrial layout and promoting coordinated regional development, and pointed out the direction of future research in the end.The main conclusions of this paper are:First, economic agglomeration regions can promote the coordinated development of local industry and industrial upgrading through improving supply environment, improving production efficiency and expanding market demand space. The empirical results showed that economic agglomeration is an important factor affecting the upgrading of industrial structure, the nonlinear relationship between economic agglomeration and the upgrading of the industrial structure is positive "U" type. The industrial structure upgrading has path-dependence and negative space spillover effect, in which the economic density on the spillover effect of the upgrading of industrial structure is positive, while the spillover effect of population density is negative. Economic growth and the upgrading of the industrial structure has "U"-type relationship, and our country is still at the bottom of the "U" shape. The results showed pursuing rapid economic growth is not advantageous to industrial transformation and upgrading, improving human capital has significantly positive effect on regional industrial structure upgrading, the introduction of foreign capital in China is still beneficial to the upgrade of industrial structure in the current stage, but reliance on exports and investment had a negative influence on the industrial structure upgrading.Second, economic agglomeration is beneficial for improving the workers’wages and employment demand, and is conducive to the promotion of public service level and the accumulation of human capital, so as to continuously enhance the economic agglomeration area attraction for the foreign population. The empirical results show that, the area with the increase of agglomeration economy improved attractive to migrant labor, labor mobility has the character of path dependence and regional diffusion characteristics, high economic concentration will stimulate the formation of regional population agglomeration. Urbanization is an important factor to attract labor force, but there were differences of expected returns between long-term and short-term flows of labor. Migrants pay more attention to the fairness of income distribution, environment quality and infrastructure construction level and other factors relative to the floating population. Economic agglomeration is conducive to increase the expenditure strength of regional public service, and improve the level of regional industry rationalization. Thus economic agglomeration can promote the attraction of labor and the rational flow of labor among industries.Third, labor flowing into the economic agglomeration area strengthens the degree of economy agglomeration, and can improve the human capital and intellectual support for the development of the service industry. Labor mobility will affect the regional population age structure, quality structure, employment and consumer preferences, which is beneficial for promoting the rapid promotion of the proportion of service industry in agglomeration area. The empirical analysis confirmed the positive relationship between the two factors, and found that the labor mobility has negative external effect to the upgrading of the industrial structure, which hinders the upgrading of the industrial structure in population outflow area. Younger labor structure can speed up the adjustment of industrial structure, promoting the overall cultural level of labor is beneficial to the upgrading of the industrial structure and enhance the positive external effect, and high quality labor force agglomeration will produce negative external effect to the industrial structure upgrading. The flow of population with youth labor as the main body will change the age structure and cultural structure of inter-regional labor force, which is to the disadvantage of the upgrading of the industrial structure of the population outflow area.Fourth, based on the theoretical and empirical research, we constructed the logic chain of "economic agglomeration-labor mobility-industrial structure upgrading", and simultaneous equation results support the validity of the theoretical analysis. Because of China’s regional development is not balanced, the large-scale labor flowing into the east from the Midwest will limit the labor supply of the central and western regions. Developing the second industry that has capital intensity and relative higher productivity characteristics consistent with the government’s demand of the central and western regions of which to speed up the economic development. Besides, because degree of economy agglomeration in the Midwest is low, the agglomeration effect is mainly reflected in the localization effect, expansion of industrial scale is conducive to enhance the scale effect of industry. The fast economic growth in the central and western regions will gradually narrow the gap with the eastern region, and the level of agglomeration, labor return scale will gradually improve, the development of service industry in central and western regions will be gradually accelerated.The main innovation of this paper is, first, constructed a chain of logic of "economic agglomeration-labor mobility- the industrial structure upgrading" from the labor mobility perspective, thus provides a new point of view to explain the difference between the area industrial structure upgrading process under the unbalanced regional development condition. Second, this paper investigated the spillover effect of economic agglomeration, labor mobility and industrial structure upgrading from the space perspective, and objectively evaluated the effect of economic agglomeration on the regional development of integration and dissimilation. Third, we examined in-depth the effect mechanism of economic agglomeration on labor mobility and labor mobility on industrial structure upgrading, respectively from the public service and the industrial structure rationalization, and from the labor age structure and quality structure. The establishment of simultaneous equations system examined the influence of interaction of the three relations, which enhanced the reliability of the logic.