Directed Technical Change,Technological Origins And Employment

Employment is a hot topic which draws great attention in China.As a country with the largest population,employment is no doubt one of the biggest issue of well-being in China.Among the many factors affecting employment,technological progress has played an important role.Under the background of the biased global technological progress,this thesis attempts to study the relationship between directed technical change and employment growth,and analyzes how technological progress from various sources of innovation can affect the growth of employment.With both CES production function and Translog production function,a panel data of manufacturing industry from 1999 to 2014 is applied to analyze the elasticity of substitution,technological bias and the relationship between directed technical change and employment growth.By further differentiating different sources of innovation,e.g.,self-dependent innovation,export,import,foreign direct investment,and technology introduction,this thesis also studies the impact of different sources of innovation on employment through the analysis of the their technological bias.Results show that technological progress of manufacturing industry is more capital-biased and discourage the employment growth.Different sources of innovation can have various effects on employment.The technological progress of self-dependent innovation,import and export in manufacturing industries are mostly labor-biased,and then have positive effect on employment.Technology purchase makes the technological progress biased towards capital use in most manufacturing industries,and has a negative effect on employment.The technological bias of foreign direct investment is sub-sector dependent,and it has different effects on employment with different manufacturing sub-sectors.Finally,based on our study,advice is suggested for policy-maker in terms of employment and economic development.We need to adopt appropriate technological innovation modes with certain polarity of technological bias that can improve the employment,such as self-dependent innovation and insist on open policy,which can help to improve the harmonious development of both technological progress and employment growth.