Research On The Impact Of Digital Economy And Human Capital Structure Upgrading On Enterprise Labor Productivity

Due to their abundant resource endowment and competitive labor costs,Chinese businesses have actively participated in the worldwide market and integrated into the global economic competition since the reform and opening up.The labor productivity of Chinese businesses has increased quickly while also producing the miracle of high-speed growth that is exclusive to China.The increase of enterprise production efficiency has emerged as a key support for the creation of a modern economic system in the Chinese style as China transitions from a high-speed to high-quality growth mode of economic development.However,due to problems such as long-term dependence on investment,low conversion rate of core technology and distortion of human resource allocation caused by the disappearance of traditional demographic dividend,there is still a big gap between the labor productivity of Chinese enterprises and that of developed countries.Chinese enterprises are facing the risk of labor productivity decline caused by core technology being controlled by others and lack of senior human capital.Therefore,how to overcome the limitations of core technologies and demographic shift in order to promote the achievement of the vision goal of 2035 has become an essential problem that must be solved.The digital economy,which includes cutting-edge information technology like communication networks,cloud computing,intelligence,sensors,and big data,has received significant attention from the Party and the state with the advent of the fourth industrial revolution.The Party’s 20th Report proposed"speeding up the development of the digital economy and promoting the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy"^[1].As a new economic form,digital economy’s"new drivers and new advantages"are constantly optimizing the efficiency of factor resource restructuring and allocation.Making full use of the digital economy is crucial to boosting labor productivity in China’s real economy and accelerating the modernization and transformation of Chinese enterprises.From the perspective of digital economy,this paper integrates the digital economy,human capital structure upgrading and enterprise labor productivity into a unified analysis framework.Firstly,the paper sorts the relevant literatures of digital economy,human capital and labor productivity,then characterizes the realistic conditions of the three in our country,subsequently sorts their interactions in accordance with previous literature studies in order to provide the theoretical framework for the three key variables and present pertinent hypotheses.Lastly,A-share listed company data from 2011 to 2019 are employed for micro level empirical estimation.According to the benchmark regression,the growth of the digital economy and the modernization of human capital structure are both beneficial to the improvement of enterprise labor productivity,and improving human capital structure is an key strategy for resolving the"new productivity paradox"brought about by the digital economy.The results of heterogeneity analysis demonstrate that the digital economy has a strong radiating and driving impact on the productivity of enterprises in the five economic zones,whereas human capital structure upgrading has little influence on the Yangtze River Economic Belt and Yellow River Economic Belt with dispersed geographical space.The digital economy and the improvement of human capital structure have more beneficial effect on enterprise labor productivity with higher regional marketization and digitalization degree.Compared with the primary industry,enterprises in the secondary and tertiary industries can greatly boost labor productivity by utilizing the digital economy and modernizing their human capital structures.After categorizing industry intensity,it is discovered that,when compared to human capital structure upgrading,which can play a productivity driving role in labor,capital,and technology-intensive industries in turn,digital economy promotes labor productivity of enterprises in labor-intensive industries more than capital-intensive industries.Further research shows that the development of the digital economy can significantly increase the labor productivity of surrounding businesses as well as that of local businesses,with a considerable spatial spillover effect.Due to the systemic risks brought on by the rivalry for human resources and knowledge sharing,the promotion for labor productivity of the human capital structure upgrading in enterprises is mainly reflected in the direct effect.The research provides a basis for China to cross the digital divide,implement the strategy of strengthening talent,and guide the optimal allocation and balanced distribution of digital elements and talent elements among regions and enterprises by establishing reasonable benefit distribution and risk control mechanism.