An Analysis On The Earning Gap Between Migrant Workers And Urban Workers

Behind the "glory" of rapid economic growth in China,the "shadow" of enlarged earning gap has become a profound economic and social problem,raising the attention of the whole world.Before the "reform and open" policy,the labor market in China has experienced urban and rural segmentation for 30 years.Under this dualistic economic system,the labor moving from different district was been strictly prohibited.Not until in the later of 1980s,the system has gradually collapsed,the labor from rural areas began to find jobs in the urban cities.From 90s,with the rapid economic development in urban areas,the demand for labor in urban areas was booming,and as well as the impetus of large earning gap,the large amount surplus of labor in agriculture sector move to urban areas finding the job opportunities.From the economic circumstance,the labor migration not only was the typical characteristic during the economic development in China,but also was the main source of transitional change and structure change of labor market in China.So analyzing the earning gap between the urban labor and migration labor should be a very important view of understanding the earning gap between urban and rural areas.From the western countries which have experience of migration inflow,migration labor usually has low earning at the beginning compared to the urban labors,but with the time passing,when they accumulate human capital their earning can catch up with urban workers'.In fact,from the circumstance of China,the earning gap between migrant workers and urban workers is continuing at a high level in the recent years.This article focuses on the phenomenon of large earning gap between migrant workers and urban workers,trying to find the reason behind this.And try to analyzing how much these reasons affect the earning gap,at last raising some advices which can be helpful to reducing the earning gap between migrant workers and urban workers.According to the research objective above,this article introduced references and theories about the wage and wage gap,and analyzing the reason of wage gap.At first,this article establishes the Mincer human capital model to analyze different factors which have influences on the wage of urban workers and migrant workers.Based on above,using wage assimilation model,Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition,Brown decomposition and multiple Logit model to analyze the wage gap between migrant workers and urban workers.The data used comes from the "China Household Income Program"(CHIP)conducted in 2002,2007 and 2010.The outcome shows that,the wage level of migrant workers are significantly lower than the wage of urban workers,and the wage gap experience a stage in which firstly enlarged and then diminished.The findings are correspond to human capital theory,the increase of education and experience can rise the wage both for urban workers and migrant workers,but the endowment of migrant workers are much lower than urban workers'.Wage assimilation model shows that with the accumulation of experience,the wage gap between migrant workers and urban workers can be narrowed.The analyzing of reason behind this gap shows that the discrimination on migrant workers is a very important reason,and the discrimination experienced a process in which firstly enlarged and later diminished.From another perspective of discrimination,that is occupational segmentation,even migrant workers have the same human capital,they are excluded from the occupation which has high wage.That is another reason which can explain the wage gap.Based on the conclusion above,this article raises several advices which are helpful to reduce the earning gap between migrant workers and urban workers.