| In the recent twenty years, developed countries, e.g. United States, has more or less experienced the income inequality problem. Many economists accord this problem to the skill-augmenting technology development. Nevertheless, China is the world’s largest developing country suffering the same problem, i.e. enlarging wage gaps between high skill workers and low skill workers. Does there exist skill-augmenting technology? If it exists, does the skill-augmenting technology affect wage gaps? This paper tries to give an answer to this problem by combining theoretical and empirical approaches.This paper first states relevant theory about technologies and skill-induced wage gap, and summarizes the theoretical framework of the relationship between the skill-augmenting technology development and skill induced wage gap. Then it introduces the data, which describes the current status of Chinese technology development and the wage gaps between workers with different education level. After the analysis, found that, with the development of technical change in China, the demand for high-tech labor has increased. At the same time, the skill-biased technical change increased the wage inequality.In empirical aspect, this paper applies time series data from1991to2008, to test the existence of the skill-augmenting technology in China and the skill premium due to this. The conclusion is that wage has been significantly enlarged by the skill-augmenting technology development. And by analyzing the effect of Chinese technology development on wage inequalities, this paper gives a reasonable explanation of the relationship between technology development and wage discrepancies, and provides a new respective for the relative research. |
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