Research On The Mobility Of Top Academic Labors In China

Top academic labor force is the key factor to promote modern economic growth.In order to speed up the construction of the world’s center for top talents and innovations,China must attract and gather a group of world-class top academic labors.Therefore,the research on the mobility of top academic labors is particularly important.From the existing research outputs,the researches on the mobility of top academic labors are relatively abundant at abroad,but unfortunately there is few of data about China.In china,the research on the mobility of top academic labors is still very limited,and most of the researches are still at the stage of descriptive analysis from the whole.The econometric analysis and comparative analysis are lacked in the research area for the mobility of top academic labors in China.Therefore,this paper closely focuses on the topic of the mobility of Chinese top academic labors.Taking the Yangtze River Scholars as an example,the research shows the panoramic picture of the distribution and mobility of top academic labors in China,and explores the rule of mobility,as well as the influencing factors and mobility effects.The main contents of this dissertation include three aspects:Firstly,the research completes the theoretical and literature induction.At first,the research systematically combs five theories including the center-periphery theory,labor migration theory,human capital theory,knowledge spillover theory and talent circulation theory,and all of them are closely related to the research topic.Then the research sort and summarize the the existing literatures from four aspects:the rule of distribution,the rule of mobility,the influencing factors of mobility and the effects of mobility.Meanwhile,the research sorts out the institutional background for the mobility of Chinese top academic labors.All of these works lay a foundation for the following researches on the mobility of Chinese top academic labors.Secondly,the research searched and established five databases.The database of the distribution of global top academic labors was established with the samples of"highly cited scientists" in 2001 and 2018,and the Database of the distribution of Chinese top academic labors was established with the samples of the Yangtze River Scholars from 1999 to 2016.Then based the distribution database of the Yangtze River Scholars in China,the research manually searched and sorted out the information of more than 2,000 Chinese top academic labors through the network and open database platforms.All of the information included the basic data such as the scholars’ native place,gender and birth year,and the academic data such as the educational experience,research field,professional experience,annual number of national projects and papers,besides some institutional and macroeconomic data such as the rank and research quality of institutions,and the development of regional economy.According to different research needs,three mobility databases were established by integrating different data information,including two for cross-section data and one for panel data.At last,the research do the empirical analysis on the mobility of top academic labors.Firstly,the research analyzed the distribution characteristics of top academic labors at home and abroad based on the two databases of distribution,and explored the internal mechanism of them.Secondly,On the basis of three databases of mobility,the research depicted the panoramic picture of the top academic labors’migration in China and summarized the mobility characteristics.And then the research explored the influence factors of the top academic labors’ migration from the perspective of external environment and internal motivation,and the mobility effects from the microcosmic perspective.Moreover,the research also compared the different preferences and the influencing changes for the mobility in scholars’different career stages,as well as the different influence effects of different types of flow.The main conclusions of this dissertation are as follows:Firstly,the research finds that the "center and periphery" distribution is appeared both in the top academic labor markets at home and abroad.From a global perspective,developed countries and regions such as the United States constitute the center of the global top academic labor force market,while China is still on the periphery of the world’s knowledge system.From a domestic perspective,China’s top academic labor market presents a "center-periphery" distribution at the regional,provincial and institutional levels,which is an inevitable result of China’s economic echelon development and also meets the objective needs of the hierarchical development of national higher education.However,the gap in the allocation of top academic labors between the centre and the periphery has been gradually reduced both in China and abroad.Secondly,the research finds that the flow number of China’s top academic labors is very limited but the flow path is single,and the mobility preference of academic labors shows differences at different stages.First of all,the number of Chinese top academic labors’ mobility has been improved but not yet excessive.The directions of the top academic labors’ mobility are unidirectional obviously,and the circulation is only formed within the central region.In the second place,the mobility preference of academic labors shows differences at different stages of scholars’ career,and"Peacock flying southeast" mainly reflects the mobility of scholars before they are selected into the talent plan.The openness of top academic labor market in different areas of China is not the same.The more close to the center,the more open of the the market.And the "asymmetry open" polices employed by the peripheral areas,will restrain the numbers of outflow and inflow of top research labors at the same time,and make the top academic labor market closed in the end.Thirdly,the research finds that the mobility of top academic labors is forced by the factors from external environment and internal motivation,and the influences of various factors are different at different stages of the scholars’ career.According to the analysis of econometric model,the factors including the high economic development,the modern social services,the high reputation of institution,have strong pulling force to the scholars’ mobility.On the contrast,the factors of high living expenses,regional and institutional high level innovation will produce thrust to top academic labors’ mobility.Hometown is an important intermediate obstacle factor for the top academic labors’ mobility.Some factors have different impacts on top academic labors’ mobility at different career stages.After being selected into the talent plan,the impact of living expenses on scholars’ mobility is weakened,but the impact of clean air is increased significantly.At last,in terms of effect,the research finds that mobility does not necessarily improve the individual research performance.According to the analysis of the econometric model,the research finds that the research performance of the group with mobility experience is lower than that of the group without mobility experience.The research performance of migrating scholars is not necessarily improved After migrating,scholars show the short-term "incremental" effect of Chinese core journal publications and the long-term "decreased" effect of English core journal publications.Different types of flows have different effects on scholars’ research output.The number of Chinese core journal publications increases after the centripetal flow group flows,while the number of Chinese core journal publications decreases significantly after the centrifugal flow group flows.The impact of mobility on individual research performance may be influenced by the cycle of research publication,the cost of mobility and different academic environments.From the perspective of the whole academic labor market,mobility has positive significance and values.The main innovations of this dissertation are as follows:on the one hand,the tedious but serious job of data searching and collating is carried out to provide a real"Chinese sample" for global research on the academic labor market and support the domestic research on this area by data as far as possible detailed.On the other hand,the research does the analysis closely around the mobility of top academic labors in China and give the policy suggestions.This will improve the reasonable intervention in academic labor market for the government,and help the government to guide the rational flow in the academic labor market by effective policies,thus to optimize the distribution of top talents in China and push forward the construction of the world’s center for top talents and innovations.