Should We Cut Down The Working Hours?

China's economic development has entered a new normal since several years ago,together with continuous decline of working-age population and the increasing of aging people which sounded the alarm for the supply of labor.How to make the best use of the existing human resources has become the crux to alleviate the serious situation.However,compared with the major countries in the world,the working hours of our labor force have achieved a high level continuously.Shall we reduce the working hours as developed countries or not?It's the desired hours,workers expect,that the starting point to consider despite which measure to be taken.The paper introduced researching status in china and abroad firstly,followed by frontier model of desired working hours with micro-theoretical basis,and we made moderate innovations based on the actual situation to pursue more applicability.Then we measured the desired working hours of china's labor force in every CHNS survey year relatively accurately,and analyzed results both internally and externally.The empirical results confirmed serious mismatch between the desired working hours and the actual working hours,as a result,most of the human resources have not been fully used.Combined the latest definition of underemployment by International Conference of Labor Statistics and the estimation of desired working hours,this paper made an accurate estimation of the underemployment rate of labor force in our country for the first time:Comprehensive underemployment rate reached at 17.94%in china.Then we explored how the individual,family,geographical and occupational factors affect the underemployment of our country's labor forces in multi-perspectives via Probit model on the panel data.At last,all conclusions of the research were summarized and recommendations were put forward from the perspective of supply-side structural reforms?...