Empirical Study Of The Influencing Factors Of Regional Integration Of Labor Market

With the deepening of the policy of "the decentralization of power and transfer of profits and the reform of the administrative empowering system since nation’s reform and open-up. While activating the regional economy, this has also made the regional market segmentation a substantial problem during the nation’s transferring process from the old system, thus impeding the establishment of the unified grand national market; therefore, the elimination of the local protection and the promotion of the regional market integration process are the important contents of the construction of China’s socialist market system. The labor market plays a fundamental role in the whole market operation, and the effective operation of all other key production elements must regard the nurturing and perfection of the labor market as a precondition (Su Yongkang,2011). However, there is a scarcity in the research which analyzed the regional market integration through the angels of the labor market (Yang Tao,2007). On the basis of the current regional segmentation research, this Paper cast its viewing angle on the labor market so as to explore the current status and influencing factors of nation’s regional integration of labor market and arrive at the beneficial conclusions.Unlike the mature labor market of the Western world, the segmentations of our nation’s labor market are the institutional segmentations, which is also the research focus of this Paper. With the deepening of the reform of the market economic system and the intensifying of the open-up to the outside world, as well as the rapid development of the economy of the non-public sector, the scale of our nation’s labor mobility has been ever increasing. However, it is wrong to assume that in our nation the labor mobility is sufficiently free due to a tremendous mobile population. The barriers for the labor mobility were like a "glass wall", which, although invisible, concretely stand between the urban area and the countryside and the various regions, hampering the mobility of the labor force (Lu Ming,2011). The segmentation of the urban areas and the countryside can be attributed to the household registration system. However, starting from the mid-1990s, the regional segmentations guided by the regional governments gradually replaced the segmentation of the urban areas and the countryside, gradually becoming the guiding factor of the labor market segmentation (Zhang Zhanxin,2010).By combining the Cluster Map method, this Paper chose the regional labor markets in with such centers as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Sichuan and used the relative price method for the surveys of the extents of the various regional labor market integrations. The survey results indicated that despite the fact that our nation’s labor market segmentation still exists, it has presented a trend of increasing integration. Among them, there existed significant differences in the status of the labor market integration of the four regions, with the extents of the regional market segmentation ranging from big to small as below:Beijing, Shanghai, Sichuan and Guangdong.On such a basis, using the extents of the labor market segmentation as the interpreted variables and the models of panel varying coefficients, this paper conducted research on the different roles of the influencing factors of the labor market integration on these four regions and it was found that there were substantial differences in the various regions’ internal developmental modes as well as economic patterns. It was proved by the empirical research that the extents of open-up to the outside world as well as the development of the economy of the non-public sector enhanced the labor mobility; nevertheless, the inconsistent steps in the internal open-up of the regions and the reforms of the ownership system intensified the extents of the regions’labor market segmentation. The local governments’ interventions in the labor market seriously hampered the process of regional labor market integration. In addition, the labor capital segmentations, which were caused by the uneven distribution of the educational resources among the various regions, were also the primary factors for causing the labor market segmentations.Based on the above assumptions, this Paper holds that although it is impractical to totally eliminate the phenomenon of labor market segmentation, it is still possible to nurture a market mechanism through the reformations of the inefficient institutional arrangements as well as the reduction of the government’s interventions in the market, with the aims of making all-out efforts to eliminate the artificial and institutional labor market segmentation and gradually establish a uniformed, more flexible and highly competitive labor market.