A Research On Labor Market Discrimination Between Urban Workers And Rural Migrants

Discrimination in the labor market exists in a lot of countries. Discrimination could happen on the base of gender, race, and caste etc. It causes both inefficiency and inequality in the social economy. At the beginning of 20th century, western economists began to investigate this problem and have formed various discrimination theories gradually.Just as the discrimination in other countries, the hukou discrimination seriously hinders the process for migrants of being integrated into urban life. It not only makes the migrants suffer a lot from differential treatment in wages gaining, but also forms the labor market segregation. However, discrimination by hukou is also an unique phenomenon in China which stems from household registration institution. Therefore, doing some research on the hukou discrimination will contribute a lot not only to the development of discrimination theory, but also to the institutional reform in China.To investigate the problem of discrimination, this paper is divided into two parts. In the theoretical part, we focus on verifying hukou discrimination with western theories and reviewing the studies of hukou discrimination in China. In the empirical part, we combine the statistical and econometric analysis to have an in-depth study on differential treatment in wages gaining. Some conclusions are drawn from the theoretical and empirical analyses. First, the wage discrimination by hukou still exists in China in 2007, since the wage differentials decomposition results show that 38.93 percent of the difference cannot be explained by observed factors which could be attributed to discrimination. Second, narrowing the gap of education level and employment experience can effectively narrow the income gap between the two groups. Third, the employment distribution impacts on wage gaining significantly which can explain 16.59 percent of the wage difference.At the end, this paper puts forward some advices to solve hukou discrimination. First, we should promote the reform of household registration system and eliminate the hukou discrimination eventually. Second, the government should allocate more education and training resource to rural migrants to enhance the equality at the start point. Third, the government should build up a unified labor market and generate more job opportunities to rural migrants.