Northwest Rural Surplus Labor Transfer

Communist Party of China attaches great importance to "three agriculture" issue in the resent proposals as "founding harmonious society", "building communist new rural area " and "the 11th five-years plan" . Because the vast majority of population in China is peasant, but the income proportion of farmers is too low, the growth of peasants' per capita income is slow even to come down .therefore, the foundation of resolving "three agriculture " problems lies in changing the peasant and the urban resident from the population proportion, making more and more peasants no longer be peasants. Moreover, shifting rural surplus labor is the very key step to carry out this target.The research into the rural surplus labor shift in China is theoretically based on overseas classics models of labor force flow, but they are not very suitable for the China's reality, for the shift of Chinese rural surplus labor has its particularity. So these models just can be referent and not to be employed straightly. We need combine the Chinese reality and these models to adjust and expand. Recently, the study on rural labor shift at home focuses on the condition and impact, which are respectively sufficient in research. Meanwhile the research on the process of shift is deficient. Lots of present research analyze problems during rural surplus labor shift, the constrained influence from household register system, labor market system, employment policy, but take less the logic relation between the question and the system background into consideration. Moreover, present research takes the rural surplus labor around the nation as the subject, less focus on a specific region like developing region. In view of the sufficiency of recent research, the paper takes the rural surplus labor in northwest area as subject, under the analysis frame of development economic, from the two angles of system transformation and human capital overflow, combines the macro-economy change and micro behavior adjustment, discusses the particularity of rural surplus shift in northwest area, attempts to explain the intrinsic connection between the existing problem and its system background, finally discusses the approach of rural surplus shift through analyzing the rural inhabitant's human capital accumulation orientation under different system background.Along with the increase of agriculture labor productivity, China's rural labor force becomes redundant. Attracting by the income disparity between city and countryside, peasants move into city to work in non-agriculture, which is a phenomenon described by the classic "Lewis-Todalo model". The rural surplus labor shift has experienced four stages in the national wild. This gradualness results from the gradual change in labor demand and city employment condition. At present, China entered into a new stage: from slight slower to rapid transfer, the rural labor force shift faces problem and its development slow down. Compared with the national situation, we hardly have positive view about rural surplus shift in northwest region. According to the measurement in this article, the shift quantity scale of rural surplus labor in northwest region has maintained at 14 million since 1993 without obvious change. The non-agriculture industry is the main channel of rural surplus shift from 1995 to 2005, the number of rural workers entering city tends to decrease. Moreover, the increase of the number of rural surplus labor shift slow down, (compared with national level) the proportion of the number of new increasing rural surplus shift in total labor is very less. So the paper pays attention to two issues: one is the employment channel and industry selection of rural surplus in non-agriculture industry; the other is the factors restricting rural surplus labor movement.The rural surplus labor shift in large-scale to city and non-agriculture dated from the middle of 1980s. In market reform process, n the one hand, massive labor are needed for the development of urban industries; on the other hand, the expansion of income disparity between city and countryside make peasants' entry into city objectively possible, and the deregulation of register system speed the shift. However, there are many problems on rural surplus labor shift, including not thorough shift, the dual labor market, the discrimination phenomenon and the low labor force quality and so on. These problems appear under certain system background, including household register system, employment system, agricultural land system and educational system and other series of unreasonable systems arrangement. These system factors have restricted the effective shift of rural surplus labor in different domains and in the varying degree.Under the Chinese special background of the dual economic structure, the rural surplus labor shift isn't only decided by the expansion of city and non-agriculture industry scale but also the accumulation of knowledge and human capital. The recent investment of human capital form rural labor's quality structure at low level, which decides that the rural labor mainly shifts to the manufacturing industry and other unnoticeable industries, namely these non- regular departments for rural labor. The phenomenon is reflected as the self-hired labor, labor paid according to work time, temporary employee, seasonal employee, free professional and employee who often change job. The accumulation of human capital has the overflow effect on peasant's agricultural production and non- agricultural employment. However, there are many factors such as current national investment into education, financial situation in county and town, professional training for peasant, investment into science and technology in rural area. All these factors restrict the accumulation of rural human capital to deferent degree.According to standard economic theory, in order to enhance income and the living standard, peasants should take effort to accumulate material capital and human capital, apply the new technical knowledge, shift redundant labor and implement specialization of production. But peasants' enthusiasm in the respect is limited in northwest rural region. Peasants' economic behaviors without rationality are just the results of the peasants' rational choice under the restraint of current system such as agricultural land-use system, household register system and so on. Our nationally compulsory and gradual system change may not only be decomposed into macroeconomic system change, urban economy system change, rural economy system change, but also has the industrial tendency, the city tendency, the region tendency and the social infrastructure construction tendency on characteristic. The kind of system change with the characteristic of tendency enlarges the income disparity between regions and between city and rural area on the one hand, on the other hand, it urges rural labor transfer to outside place and increase their income, but increase the employment cost of rural labor entering into city and reduce their motive of non-agriculture human capital accumulation in city. The insufficiency of human capital lead to difficulties in rural surplus labor shift to non-agriculture industry and to city thoroughly. So taking jobs both in inner countryside and between city and countryside become the rational choice for rural surplus labor. Finally, the human capital bottle-neck restricting thorough shift is hardly conquered, thus forms a vicious circle.The key reason of failure on effectively shift is the difficult situation caused by the tendency on human capital accumulation. Therefore, the dual effect from system change and the human capital overflow must be the base to discuss the new model of rural surplus labor shift in northwest region. The model is that on the premise of system innovation, takes the rural labor force the human capital accumulation as the core, take the chance of the new industrialization and the new communist rural reconstruction, takes reform on rural industrialization strategy and education system as priority, then form the shift pattern "interaction between city and countryside as a whole body": give the first place to local shift and make the migration from other place subsidiary.