The Impact On Labor Employment Due To Industrial Upgrading In China

Although Chinese economic construction has made great achievements since its reform and opening-up,there are contradictions between the industry upgrading and employment growth due to the long-term dependence on labor-intensive industries and extensive development mode.With deeper opening-up,Chinese industries are facing the impact from foreign advanced technology nowadays,and meanwhile they need to speed up their upgrading to improve their international competitiveness.Therefore,the study of the employment effect of industrial upgrading is one of the most urgent problems that need to be solved for promoting industrial upgrading and ensuring the security of employment.Firstly,based on the theory of industrial upgrading and employment,this thesis put forwards the study of Chinese industrial upgrading in terms of two levels,which are the industrial structure and industrial value chain.Secondly,the characteristics of industrial upgrading and its changing relationship with employment are analyzed according to the provincial panel data from 1978 to 2014.Finally,the linear regression model and threshold regression model of panel date are used to analyze the impact of industrial upgrading on employment in China,and the relevant conclusions are summarized.Data support and policy suggestions are also provided to improve the employment effect of industrial upgrading.The main conclusions are shown as following.Firstly,despite that the Chinese industrial structure optimization is generally consistent with the international trend of industrial structure change,the structural deviation of the tertiary industry is lower than the international standard and the development of the tertiary industry is lagging behind the international level.Secondly,our industrial value chain has a clear geographical characteristic,industrial characteristic and technical characteristic.Geographical characteristic is that the development of the industrial value chain in the eastern regions is ahead of that in the central and western regions and their gap is growing.Industrial characteristic refers to that secondary industry's value chain is ahead of other industriesand tertiary industry value chain in western area is higher than that central region.In terms of technical characteristic,the Tech and Effch changes alternately as the main factor in the development of industrial value chain overall,while the main factor of industrial value chain program in the eastern and central is Tech and Effch respectively.Thirdly,the labor productivity has a positive effect on the employment of our country as a whole.It means that the higher the labor productivity,the more workers will be.Fourth,the industrial structure deviation plays a significant inhibitory effect on employment growth overall.The impact of industrial structure deviation on employment coefficient becomes from-0.2565 to-0.2337 and then smaller to-0.2987 when opening-up as the threshold variable.The change of the coefficient shows that when the level of opening-up raised from the initial stage to the middle period,the inhibitory effect of the industrial structure deviation on the employment is reduced.And as opening level increasing,the inhibitory effect further improved.Fifth,technological progress also showed negative inhibition on the employment growth.However,the impact of technological progress on employment has increased from-1.352 to-1.232 and then to-1.08 when opening-up is the threshold variable.The change in the coefficient of technological progress indicates that although the technological progress has a significant "destructive effect" on employment growth,this " destructive effect" is gradually smaller with the continuous improvement of the level of opening-up.Therefore,we should speed up the value chain development and optimize the regional industrial structure,to protect the stability of Chinese labor market and promote the development of employment.