Читать книгу China's Rural Labor Migration and Its Economic Development - Xiaoguang Liu - Страница 18

Fresh and valuable materials have been provided by the practical experience of economic development and labor transfer during the period of China’s reform and opening-up to understand the relationship between economic transformation and labor transfer discovered by developmental economics. The group of the large-scale transfer of laborers constitutes an important supporting force for China’s economic growth, which helps expand the size of the labor market and increase the total factor productivity of the urban economy. The key to the long-term rapid growth of the Chinese economy will still lie in the continued transfer of surplus labor, which will bring about obvious benefits to China’s economic development in the next few years.¹²

After more than 30 years of rapid economic growth, China’s economy has entered a critical stage of optimization of the economic growth rate and structural adjustment. On the one hand, China still has a lot of agricultural labor force to be transferred because the existing agricultural labor force accounts for more than 30%. On the other hand, a “labor short-age” has occurred frequently in the developed provinces along the east coast in recent years. Many enterprises face a labor shortage, despite the rapid rise in labor wages. Labor shortage has been an important factor in the declining international competitiveness of Chinese enterprises. In this context, how to promote the continued transfer of the surplus agricultural labor force is an important issue to be addressed urgently.

To solve this practical problem, it is theoretically necessary to further clarify the determinants of labor transfer. In the past 30 years or so, why has the rural labor force shifted on a large scale and shown the extremely obvious characteristics of spatial agglomeration? What are the major factors that have affected this process and made it a turning point? How does the difference between urban and rural productivity form and act on the transfer of labor? In addition to the differences in productivity between urban and rural sectors, are there more specific factors that affect the transfer of labor in China? Only when these general and special factors are clarified can we truly grasp the internal laws of the historical process of the transfer of labor in China to bring forward pertinent suggestions and measures for the further promotion of the transfer of labor and for the reform of the labor factor market and economic growth in the next stage.

Therefore, this section focuses on the driving factors of the transfer of agricultural labor by means of a theoretical and empirical analysis. Due to limitations of space, the theoretical analysis is limited and can be found in the “Appendix B: Driving Factors and Spillover Effects of the Transfer of Agricultural Labor”. The processes and results of the empirical analysis are described in the following sections.