Читать книгу China's Rural Labor Migration and Its Economic Development - Xiaoguang Liu - Страница 20

The number of rural employees and the number of employees in the rural primary industry in various provinces and regions from 1978 to 2008 can be found in the Compilation of Agricultural Statistics Data of 60 Years in New China (the Compilation). These two groups of data measure the distribution of employment of the rural registered labor force in agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. The Compilation “directly collects and calculates the employees who have lived outside the household for more than half a year, but whose income is linked to the family economy in the statistical caliber of rural population and rural employees used in relevant proportions”. Therefore, it is possible to accurately measure the number of members of the agricultural labor force who have transferred by subtracting the number of employees in the rural primary industry from the number of rural employees. In addition, the provincial and regional data with the same statistical calibers in the Compilation for 2009 and 2010 can be found in the China Statistical Yearbook, which facilitates the extension of the data regarding the transfer of labor to 2010.¹⁸ Based on this, the indicator of the transfer of agricultural labor is constructed to reflect that transfer.

The amount of the transfer of agricultural labort = transfer of agricultural labort − transfer of agricultural labor_t−1, where, the transfer of agricultural labort = the number of rural employeest − the number of employees in the rural primary industry_t−1.

Considering the complexity of the issue of the transfer of China’s labor force, it is necessary to carefully select and extract the information about the transfer of labor from multiple sets of data according to the needs of research. The data from the 2010 national census contain detailed information on population migration in the provinces and regions, but a certain discrepancy exists between the data on migration and the data regarding the transfer of employment, and the data are only cross-sectional data for 2010. In case of the individual effects of the provinces and regions beyond control, it is difficult to fully verify the exact relationship between infrastructure and the transfer of labor. The data from the second national agricultural census exclude the rural workers who have lived outside for half a year, significantly underestimating the number of rural employees and the transfer of labor.