| From the 40 years ago since the reform and opening-up,China has experienced and is experiencing its largest scale of labor geographical mobility.In 2020,the scale reaches 376 million Chinese,accounting for 26.62% of the total population.It means that more than one in four people is in geographical mobility.With the economic and social development,this trend is more obvious,and the scale is still expanding.Compared with 1990,the mobile population in 2020 had a rapid expansion and increased by 1661% while there was small change in the total population and only increased by 23.5%.As time goes by,labor geographical mobility is characterized by "towards southeast","by the younger","with high skill" and "for long-term settlement".In this case,large scale labor mobility has become an important driving force for China’s industrialization and urbanization.At the same time,its unique characteristics have gradually changed the geographical distribution in age,skill across China,further causing changes in productivity,market distribution and economic structure,finally affecting the coordinated economic development among regions and the realization of common prosperity.As a country in the process of transformation,there exist many confusing phenomena in China’s micro individual behavior choice and macroeconomic operation.These phenomena are rarely seen in mature markets and developed economies.In terms of the labor geographical mobility,the coordinated development in social welfare and social security among regions,this paper notes several typical facts: Firstly,there widely exists the problem of "abnormally low consumption and high labor intensity" in China’s large-scale mobile population,causing a certain degree of welfare loss.In addition,the characteristics of high savings rate(consumption is abnormally low)and little leisure(labor intensity is abnormally high),are particularly obvious among the groups who plan to return home,cross provincial mobility,and have higher local relocation costs.Secondly,the labor geographical mobility leads to a "vicious circle" in regional social security while young labors move out from low-income areas and crowd in high income areas.On the one hand,it leads to the heavier financial burden in supporting for low-income areas with a higher actual contribution rate;On the other hand,the higher actual contribution rate further lowers the real income and weakens industrial attraction of these regions,causing more labor to move out and eventually falling into a "vicious circle".Thirdly,this paper also notes that there is a close spatial relationship between the degree of marketization,the flow of young people and the regional financial burden for support.Among areas,the lower the degree of marketization is in area,the more young people move out from the area and the heavier its financial burden for support with the more unused elderly labor resources.There are three core issues in the research of labor geographical mobility: Who are in mobility? What are the effects? Where do labor crowd into? The first issue concerns the population in mobility itself;The second issue concerns its impacts.The third issue focuses on the factors which drives the labors to be in mobility.Similarly,in order to deeply discuss these three core issues,this paper further proposes the following questions for research: firstly,what pushes the population in mobility to choose this low desire,high labor intensity lifestyle? What is the logic behind this micro behavior? Second,what impacts does the mobility of population have on regional social security? How to formulate the optimal regional coordination model of social security to maximize social welfare and ultimately achieve balanced regional development? Third,further analyze what other reasons and mechanisms drive the large-scale mobility of the young with high human capital to gather in big cities besides the high wage income level? Is there any deeper reason for the differences in social security burden,young labors and capital flows and economic development in different regions,such as the North and the South?In view of these three major issues,this paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the impacts of mobility of labors on the coordinated development in social welfare and social security among regions based on the three research subjects-the labors in mobility,the area to move out,the area to crowd in,from the micro individual and regional macro perspective.First,as for the first research subject-labors in mobility,this paper analyzes how the mobility of labors driven by the high wage level affects their own welfare.There are two main explanations behind the phenomenon that the savings rate and labor supply of the labors in mobility far exceed that of local labors.One is labor intertemporal substitution hypothesis.That is,the labor in mobility hopes to work hard in the high-income stage of their life cycle to obtain more income and save more assets for consumption to response to the declined income after returning home.The other is the settlement cost hypothesis.The labors in mobility needs more labor supply and more savings to afford the settlement cost to settle in the new area.Using the intertemporal substitution model and the dynamic monitoring data of the national labors in mobility,this paper analyzes the impact of the willingness to settle down and the assets of the residence on the savings and labor supply.The research finds that the labors in mobility without the intention of settling down will have higher savings rate and more labor supply in consideration of future income to fall,which supports the inter-temporal labor substitution hypothesis;The labors in mobility without house in the local area has higher savings rate and more labor supply,which supports the settlement cost hypothesis.The reasons for the high savings rate and high labor supply of labors in mobility vary in different groups: those with families whose children and parents do not move with them and those with relatively low skills choose to work harder and consume less under the effects of inter-temporal substitution while those who move in together with their children and parents and those with relatively high skills choose to work harder and consume less to cover the cost of settling down to integrate into the local society.For the former,the government can effectively reduce the impact of inter-temporal substitution by narrowing the income gap between regions,actively promoting the employment of returnees in nearby areas and returning to their hometown for entrepreneurship;For the latter,it is more effective to increase the effective supply of affordable housing,improve the accessibility of public services and reduce the restrictions on the settlement of key groups such as those who have been working and living in the local area for more than 5 years,with family migration and high skills.Furthermore,the second question was answered by focusing on "the impact of labor geographical mobility on inflow and outflow areas" by discussing the relationship between labor geographical mobility and the model of coordinated development in regional social security.Based on a theory of labor mobility when there is a social security system,this paper analyzes the impact of labor mobility on the coordinated development of regional social security through models and empirical data.At the same time,it discusses the social welfare effects of three regional coordination models of social security: "regional independence","national unity" and "mutual adjustment",and discusses how to optimize the regional coordination model of social security.The analysis shows that: first,the social security system may become the "accelerator" of labor mobility.As a result,the income and expenditure of the social security fund in the labor outflow region deteriorated and the contribution rate continued to rise,which in turn reduced the actual wage level in the outflow region,leading to more labors’ outflow.Second,as far as efficiency is concerned,neither the "regional independent model" nor the "national unified model" is optimal.The former is lack of inter-regional adjustment,which leads to excessive labor mobility,large regional rate differences and other problems.The latter is just the opposite.Or the former causes the "negative externalities" caused by population mobility to the outflow area,while the latter leads to the "positive externalities".There is a "mutual adjustment model" and a "hometown tax model" that can eliminate externalities and achieve optimal efficiency.Third,if regional fairness is considered,then there exists a frontier of "fairnessefficiency trade-off".This boundary is highly similar to the frontier boundary in "Markowitz Modern Portfolio Theory",in which the section from "regional independent model" to "mutual adjustment model" with optimal efficiency is "invalid frontier".At this time,the government can not only promote fairness,but also improve efficiency by increasing regional adjustment efforts,reducing the rate in outflow social security payment to reduce the scale of labor mobility,and increasing the audit of outflow area.However,from the "mutual adjustment model" with the best efficiency,it has entered the "effective frontier".If further measures such as improving the adjustment strength are taken,regional fairness can still be improved,but efficiency will be lost.Fourth,the "effective frontier" is unexpectedly flat,and the "fairness-efficiency conversion ratio" is extremely high,which means that only a small amount of efficiency needs to be sacrificed to achieve a significant increase in regional fairness.Finally,the paper focused on and discussed other profound driving factors behind labor mobility and reasons for the outflow of young people and regional differences in support burden to respond to the third question.Some regions in China are faced with the heavy burden of social security support and the outflow of young labor,which has become an important issue related to common prosperity and regional coordinated development.Based on the theoretical framework of human capital progress and wage structure compression,this paper provides a new and unified explanatory hypothesis for these phenomena.The empirical data shows that the heavy burden of support in regions with low marketization is not mainly caused by the high degree of aging population.In China,the young has a high level of education and human capital,while the elderly near retirement are relatively low level.However,paying salaries based on marginal product contributions may dampen the enthusiasm of older employees.Therefore,enterprises must pay higher salaries to older workers with the progress of human capital of young workers.That is,there is an externality between young labor’s salaries and older labor’s salaries,The phenomenon of "the waves behind the Yangtze River push the waves ahead" occurs.The theoretical model shows that this has led to the compression of wage structure in state-owned enterprises and the regions filled with state-owned enterprises.On the one hand,insufficient payment for young labor is likely to lead to the outflow of young labor;On the other hand,the salary of the elderly labor force is relatively rigid,which leads to insufficient demand for the elderly labor force by enterprises.They hope to use young labor force to eliminate the elderly labor force,thus increasing the unused elderly human resources.These two aspects have pushed up the financial social security burden of support.The young labor mobility and unused elderly labor resources can roughly accounts for the relationship between of the output value of state-owned enterprises and the social security burden of support to the extent of83.46%.The young labor mobility factor individually can accounts for the relationship to the extent of 34.7%,which is an important reason for the heavier burden of support in regions filled with many state-owned enterprises.Counterfactual analysis shows that the above regional differences in the financial social security burden of support,labor and capital outflows and the decline in economic growth are to some extent,an "inadaptability" for regions where the market mechanism is not strong enough under the environment of rapid inter-generational human capital progress,especially for industries and regions where the elderly labor force is highly replaceable.Moreover,the decrease in the cost of labor mobility across regions will not only aggravate the difference in the regional financial social security support burden,but also aggravate the overall support burden in the country.For this reason,this paper proposes that the "inadaptability" of these regions in the environment of rapid inter-generational human capital progress can be alleviated by reforming the employment and salary system and improving the flexibility of elderly employment,including the outflow of young people,insufficient participation rate of elderly labor,capital outflow,social security fund imbalance and other issues.The contributions of this paper are as follows: First,a systematic portrait of the driving mechanism of labor mobility and its regional economic and social consequences is drawn from the typical facts of China’s unique characteristics of labor mobility and regional differences;Secondly,focusing on the phenomenon of "high savings and high labor supply" in China’s labors in mobility,this paper finds evidence supporting the existence of "inter-temporal substitution" in macroeconomic theory from a micro perspective,and further reveals the important reasons why the labors chose a lifestyle with huge welfare losses in the process of mobility;Thirdly,this paper summarizes all kinds of regional coordination models of social security into three types.Focusing on demonstrating the performance of these three regional coordination models in terms of fairness and efficiency,this paper proposes a "accelerator" principle of social security for the process of mobility,and then constructs a theory of optimal regional coordination model of social security;Fourthly,through a structural model combined with the fair wage theory,this paper discusses whether there is any possibility to naturally generate and fit young labor outflow,regional social security support burden differences and other phenomena assuming there only exists difference in degrees of wage structure compression due to different marketization level among areas,so as to establish a unified and logical selfconsistent explanatory theoretical hypothesis. |
PDF Full Text Request