Research On The Influence Of Technological Innovation About Employment Number And Structure In Beijing

Technological innovation is an inexhaustible motive force of economic and social development and the decisive factor to enhance the comprehensive strength of a country. Beijing’s regional innovation capability has been the best in the country, and with the amount of scientific and technological innovation to achieve rapid economic growth and industrial structure optimization. During "Twelve-Five Plan", Beijing will play a major role in enhancing the capability of independent innovation and national strength with "Science and Technology Beijing" as a slogan to create a comprehensive "national innovation centers". At the same time, the increasingly severe employment pressure of Beijing has got the community’s attention. This pressure is not only reflected in the continued excess supply of labor, but also in structural upgrading workforce skills lag behind the rapid pace of technological innovation, that means total employment and structural contradictions coexist. Therefore, how to give full play to the role of technological innovation to promote employment, livelihood technology services to achieve the fundamental objective, government and academia has become an important issue. Based on the relevant literatures of technological innovation impact on employment, this thesis empirically examines the science and technology innovation on quantity and structure of employment with macro and micro data, and put forwards a number of policy recommendations to promote employment by scientific and technological innovation in Beijing.Backtracking economics literatures, we can find, since Ricardo era, the impact of technological innovation on employment is a classic economics issues. The impact of technological innovation on quantity of employment represents the mix of substitution effect and the income effect. On the one hand, production mechanization and automation brought by scientific and technological innovation lead to substitution of capital for labor, and labor demand reduces; on the other hand, lower production costs and addition of product demand and market expansion brought by scientific and technological innovation will increase the demand for labor. Similarly, the impact of scientific and technological innovation on structure of employment includes "skill-biased" innovation and "skill degenerate". On the one hand, the division of labor specialization, standardization process triggered by technological innovation will reduce some sectors of the labor skills required; the other hand, the improvement of production process and the rapid development of high-tech industries will increase the requirements of social skills in the labor force. What kinds of effects will be the mainstream depends on the particularity requirement of development of technological innovation and economic and society on the particular area and a specific period, which needs targeted and depth empirical research.Compared with other cities, the technical innovation of Beijing has its distinctive features:First, universities, research institutes and high-tech talent gathered, an adequate supply of human capital; Second, high-tech products and services consumed in large quantity, and there are large of knowledge-intensive, technology exchange and trade with the developed countries; Third, industrial structure presents knowledge-intensive and technology-intensive features, highly demand for educated and highly skilled personnel; Fourth, there are large science and technology innovation and financial support from government, and many universities and research institutions and other public sector commitments are dominant position of innovation. According to industry life cycle theory, the innovative "sector type" theory, defensive skill-biased innovation theory of innovation and employment relations and other related theories, these features will lead to positive role of technological innovation on the city’s number of jobs generated in promoting and employment structure, which led to more demand for white-collar workers, business, professional and technical personnel and highly educated staff.Macro-and micro-level empirical studies confirm the above inference. At the macro level, technological innovation indirectly promotes job growth by pushing up GDP and labor productivity, but the employment elasticity need to be improved. At the same time, technological innovation promotes the upgrades of employment structure in Beijing, including the increasing of ratio of the proportion of employees in tertiary industry, especially producer services and highly educated staff. At the micro level, based on the survey of130enterprises, the author finds that product innovation and process innovation could promote growth in the number of employees, and to increase the proportion of R&D personnel, professional and technical personnel and highly educated white-collar employees, where the original innovation have a more significant role in promoting increased of the proportion of these employees.In order to further improve the role of technological innovation in promoting employment and alleviate the pressure of technological progress on structural and quantity of employment, we should implement the "strategic priority to employment", that means all scientific and technological innovation and industrial structure adjustment should be to promote employment and improve people’s livelihood as the primary goal. We should do the following work:First, to continue the development of information transmission, computer services and software industry, business services, medical and health, social security and social welfare, scientific research and technology services, financial services, etc. Second, closely linked to the pace of industrial restructuring, promote higher education and vocational education; strengthen communication and contact among school education, research activities and corporate, improve the matching of human capital and demand of graduates skills. Third, make enterprises, especially SMEs play a dominant position of innovation, improve integration of production and research, and promote the industrialization of scientific and market-oriented, while improving the proportion of independent innovation and primary innovation. and to improve the degree of matching of technological innovation and consumer demand structure, skill structure of labor. Finally, develop civil technology to truly serve the public scientific and technological achievements and benefit all the people.