An Empirical Analysis Of The Impact Of Urban-rural Dual Economic Structure On The Technological Progress Bias

Since 2004,the phenomenon of "shortage of migrant workers" has appeared in some areas of China,which shows that our country is beginning to emerge labor shortage.Faced with the gradual disappearance of China's demographic dividend after 2010,in order to maintain stable and sustained economic growth,we must improve the marginal productivity of labor factors,and technological progress should be labor-biased.However,a large number of empirical studies show that China's technological progress is capital-biased and it may cause a series of problems,such as the decline of labor income share,inequitable income distribution etc.The urban-rural dual economic institutions with household registration system as the core hinder the free flow of rural surplus labor factor.On the one hand,it accelerates the disappearance of demographic dividend,on the other hand,it aggravates the capital-biased technological progress in China through direct and indirect effects.Therefore,it is necessary and urgent to study the impact of urban-rural dual economic structure on the bias of technological progress.Based on the theory and research of technological progress bias,this paper estimates the capital-labor substitution elasticity of China's provinces during 1978-2016 by using the standardized supply-side system equation on the assumption of CES total production function.The results show that the factor substitution elasticity of China's provinces ranges from 0.73 to 2.583,and the factor substitution elasticity of most provinces is slightly less than 1.Capital and labor are complementary in general.Further,this paper uses Xu Xianxiang's(2010)method to define the technology progress bias index to quantitatively measure the technology progress bias,and calculates the labor efficiency growth rate and capital efficiency growth rate in the sample interval,thus obtaining the technology progress bias index of each province in specific years.The results show that technological progress in China's provinces has steadily biased towards capital in most years,especially in 1992,2004 and 2010.However,in 2008,due to the outbreak of the global subprime crisis,technological progress in that year showed clear labor-bias.Finally,this paper quantitatively measures the strength of urban-rural dual economic structure by constructing a binary contrast coefficient and explores the relationship between the urban-rural dual economic structure and the capital-biased technological progress in China through the corresponding regression model.It is found that there is a negative correlation between the urban-rural binary contrast coefficient and the bias index of technological progress in China.That is,the smaller the urban-rural binary contrast coefficient,the stronger the urban-rural binary structure,the larger the bias index of technological progress,and the more the trend of technological progress towards capital.On this basis,the sample interval is divided into four periods according to the fluctuation of technology progress bias index,and the impact of urban-rural dual economic structure on technology progress bias is studied in each period.It is concluded that the urban-rural dual economic structure has the greatest impact on China's technological progress bias in the period of 2005-2010.Therefore,this paper proposes to speed up the reform of the household registration system in order to alleviate the dual economic structure of urban and rural areas in China as soon as possible.