Income Gap Of Migrant Workers:Ability Difference Or Institutional Obstacle?

Narrowing the income gap is the key to achieving common prosperity.In his party’s 20 th annual report,General Secretary Xi Jinping made it clear that the essence of Chinese-style modernization is to achieve common prosperity for all the people.The existence of the income gap has become an important obstacle to the construction of new urbanization and the realization of common prosperity for all the people.At present,the internal income gap of migrant workers in China is still very serious.According to the micro survey data of migrant workers in 2019 in Jiangsu Province,the lowest monthly salary of migrant workers is only 900 yuan,the highest is 200,000 yuan,and the absolute income difference is huge.The income gap of migrant workers is still an important issue for economic development.On the basis of systematic sorting out and drawing on relevant literature at home and abroad,this paper summarizes the factors affecting the income gap of migrant workers into two aspects: internal and external causes.The internal cause is the difference of the individual ability of migrant workers,and the external cause is the influence of the macro system.It analyzes the possible reasons for the widening of the income gap of migrant workers based on these two perspectives.Firstly,the income gap of migrant workers is measured,using the methods of Gini coefficient,Tyre coefficient,coefficient of variation;secondly,the empirical analysis of the effect of the ability factors on the income gap,and the endogenous and robustness test,and finally the difference of the influence of institutional factors on the income gap of migrant workers.The conclusions of this paper are as follows: First,the income gap of migrant workers in Jiangsu province is expanding overall.Although the Gini coefficient is still within the range of income distribution,it is close to the international warning line;the coefficient of variation is relatively large and reached its peak in 2018;the Thire index decomposition shows that the income gap in southern Jiangsu is obvious compared with that in central Jiangsu and northern Jiangsu.Second,both human capital ability and urban integration ability have significant negative effects on the income of migrant workers,among which the impact of vocational skills training on the income gap is greater than that of education level and urban integration ability on the income gap of migrant workers.Third,the influence of citizenization on income gap is greater than that of contracted land on income gap.Finally,through comparative analysis,it is found that the ability difference and institutional barriers will lead to the income gap of migrant workers.Among them,vocational skills training and citizenization have the greatest impact on the income gap,which shows that the impact of ability and system on the income gap of migrant workers is mainly through vocational skills training and citizenization.Therefore,on the premise of continuously improving the income level,to alleviate the income gap between migrant workers,it is necessary to strengthen the vocational skills training for migrant workers,and encourage active urbanization rather than passive urbanization in the process of new urbanization.