The Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Foreign Trade And Employment In China

Since reform and openness, especially the accession to the WTO, China's foreign trade has made brilliant achievements attracting the worldwide attention, whose total amount has been ranked second in the world. China's import and export value in 1978 was 20.6 billion dollars, which until the end of 2008 had reached 2.5616 trillion U.S. dollars, increasing 123 times within 31 years at the average annual speed of 18.1%. While because of the worldwide financial crisis, China's foreign trade took on a downslide trend for the first time in 2009, the achievement of 2.2072 trillion U.S. dollars were still remained that is called only thriving in the world. At the same time, China's employment problem became increasingly severe. From 2001 to 2008, China's urban unemployment had increased from 8.94 million to 13.24 million with an increase of 48%. Due to the impact of the worldwide financial crisis, foreign trade blocked, economic growth slowed, unemployment population increased significantly, coupled with rural surplus labor force in need of transfer, laid-off urban workers for re-employment and new graduates for each year, finally resulted to the contradiction of supply more than demand in labor market increasingly sharp and the employment pressure increasingly big.Thriving foreign trade accompanied with severe unemployment problem, the positive impact of foreign trade on employment is not obvious. So, what kind of relationship between China's foreign trade growth and employment is on earth? What is the law existing in this relationship and this development trend of relationship? This paper, according to the status of China's employment and foreign trade, with the method of integrating theory with practice and empirical analysis with normative analysis, made regression analysis based on the data of urban and rural employment population, import and export amount during the years of 1978 to 2009 to totally study on the relationship between China's foreign trade and the employment. Meanwhile, it gave a stage analysis on the impact of China's foreign trade to employment and summarized the general rule about the impact of China's foreign trade to employment. Finally, combined with the challenges and opportunities in front of China's foreign trade in new period, this paper tried to explore employment measures appropriate for China with the perspective of trade, in order to provide a reference for China's economic transformation, foreign trade policy adjustment and employment policy formulation.This paper is composed of six parts. The first part is introduction, mainly including the background and significance, the framework, research methods, innovation and defects. The second part is a review of theory and literature. On the basis of reading extensive literatures, this paper summed up of various expressions in international trade theories on the employment impact of foreign trade, from The Theory of Comparative Advantage, Factor Endowment Theory, Keynes Trade Multiplier Theory, The Limited Trade Theory to The Strategic Trade Theory, forming a comparatively systematic elaboration. Meanwhile, it reviewing the foreign and domestic literatures on the employment impact of international trade, laid the theoretical foundation for later discussion. The third part is the empirical analysis on the impact of international trade to employment. This paper, established in the practice of China's reform and openness, based on, based on a large number of the latest data, extending forward to the beginning of reform and openness, back up to 2009, through regression analysis and phase analysis deeply studied and analyzed the relationship between foreign trade and employment, and explored the impact of international trade to employment in 5 historic stages, so as to arrive at the historic law and development trend in China, a big developing country with economic transformation. The conclusion is that the negative impact of export on employment is not significant, but the overall impact of foreign trade is positive to drive the employment, and this driving role is diminishing with China's reform and openness. The fourth part is the challenges and opportunities under the new situation in front of the development of foreign trade in China to promote employment. The Fifth part provided the corresponding measures and suggestions, namely to actively adjust our foreign trade strategy, to change trade growth mode, adjust the industrial and trade structure, to actively cultivate core competitiveness of Chinese enterprises in order to seize the opportunity to achieve sustainable development of China's foreign trade and employment. The last part summarized the main points of the whole paper.