A Study On The Decomposition Of The Wage Gap Based On The Characteristics Of The Migrant Population In The Pearl River-West River Economic Belt

Over the past 40 years of the reform and opening-up,China’s economic development has made tremendous achievements.The large size of the migrant population is an important driving factor in the urbanization and industrialization process,but they are relatively disadvantaged in terms of sharing the fruits of reform and development,focusing on the protection of basic public services,the protection of their legal rights and interests,and the improvement of their living conditions,etc.As a result,the issue of urban integration of the migrant population has attracted much attention in recent years.With the low level of wealth accumulation and lack of property income,wage income constitutes almost the entire source of income for the migrant population,thus the level of wage income directly affects the urbanization process of the migrant population and is the economic guarantee for the integration of the migrant population into urban development.The current inequality in the distribution of income among the residents of China has intensified,and the structural differences between the urban and rural areas of the migrant population have further led to an imbalance in wage income.As a result,revealing the current situation of income distribution among the migrant population and its influencing factors has become a practical requirement for implementing the concept of people-oriented development and promoting highquality economic and social transformation.As a basin space with significant regional development disparities and a large migrant population in China,the Pearl River-West River Economic Belt has seen the structural differentiation of the migrant population intensify over the past decade,with the migrant population gradually changing from a group dominated by surplus rural labor to one with diversified structural characteristics.Based on this,it is necessary to pay attention to the intrinsic dynamics of wage growth and the formation mechanism of wage disparity among the migrant population between different individual features,to take into account the wage disparity issue while vigorously raising the wage income level of the migrant population,to focus on the key point of urban integration,and to promote the implementation of the new peopleoriented urbanization strategy.Based on the push and pull theory of population mobility,human capital theory and labor market segmentation theory,this paper conducts certain theoretical explorations on the formation mechanism of the income gap of the migrant population.Following the analytical ideas of classical theories at home and abroad on the labor force wage gap,using the micro data of CMDS 2011,CMDS 2015 and CMDS 2017,using a combination of unconditional quantile regression and decomposition based on the recentration impact function,and the decomposition of the wage gap is carried out to analyse the formation mechanism of the wage gap of the migrant population in the Pearl River-West River Economic Belt in terms of both structural and compositional effects,and then to provide an empirical basis for reducing the wage gap of the migrant population.The study shows that gender,education level and employment status of the migrant population in the Pearl River-West River Economic Belt have a significant impact on the changes in the wage structure,with significant changes in the wage gap between groups.There is a significant difference in the level and growth of wage income between non-agricultural and agricultural migrants,with the former’s wage income far exceeding that of agricultural migrants,both in absolute terms and in terms of growth.After systematically examining the changes in the distribution of individual characteristics and the returns to individual characteristics of the migrant population,the results of the wage gap decomposition show that the gender wage gap of the middle and high-income groups shows a significant trend of widening,leading to a widening of the wage gap of the migrant population;the difference in the returns to education of the migrant population with non-agricultural and agricultural household registration widens the wage gap of the migrant population;the returns to self-employment and self-employed labor of the migrant and low-income groups show a decreasing trend,the relative rise in the return to employment of wage earners has narrowed the wage gap.Labor market segmentation,gender discrimination and the polarization of income gaps due to institutional barriers not only affect the goal of people-oriented urbanization,but also have a serious impact on the personal and household consumption,mobility propensity and well-being of disadvantaged wage recipients.Accordingly,this paper proposes the following four countermeasures.Firstly,strengthen the policy direction of the income distribution mechanism and focus on raising the income of the middle and lower income groups.With the development of China’s economy,peasant workers are the group with the most potential to enter the middle income level at this stage.Efforts should be made to raise the income level of the peasant worker group and reduce the widening wage gap within the migrant population.Secondly,the construction of labor market mechanisms should be improved to ensure the equal realisation of workers’ rights.To fully stimulate the creativity and development vitality of the migrant population in the Pearl River-West River Economic Belt,we must enable them to realise their value in a more equitable employment environment.Thirdly,promoting urban-rural education parity and improving human capital accumulation among rural migrants.The divergence in returns to education under household registration differences in the Pearl River-West River Economic Belt to some extent indicates that rural migrants are still disadvantaged in terms of human capital accumulation,and that urban biased policies have exacerbated the backward position of rural education levels.Fourthly,while promoting the upgrading and transformation of industries,attention should be paid to adjusting the labor supply structure.We should strengthen skills training for the migrant population and make use of the "learning by doing" effect to improve the human capital accumulation of the middle and lower income groups in practice.