Читать книгу China's Rural Labor Migration and Its Economic Development - Xiaoguang Liu - Страница 32

The main driving factors of the transfer of agricultural labor have been analyzed by using the panel data of China’s provinces and regions. The results of the analysis suggest that the urban–rural income gap, the improvement in the level of infrastructures, the increase in economic growth and return on capital and the decline in the proportion of stateowned enterprises or the development of the private sector are the main driving factors for the transfer of agricultural labor in China, and the current biased factors such as financial development and public education expenditure are not conducive to the transfer of agricultural labor.

In the event of a large number of surplus agricultural labor force to be transferred in the real economy, China has shown the signs of widening the urban–rural income gap and slowing down the momentum of the transfer of labor, arousing concern about the sustainability of the “transition dividend” in the academic and industrial circles. In view of the large number of agricultural labor force to be transferred, the potential “transition dividend” will continue to play its huge growth effect for a long time, and it is not pessimistic about whether China can successfully get out of the middle-income trap. According to the results of the test in this section, the transfer of agricultural labor can be greatly promoted by improving the construction of infrastructure and promoting the development of the private sector.

It should be especially noted that the improvement of the level of infrastructure not only effectively promotes the transfer of agricultural labor to the non-agricultural sector but also provides an important material basis for industrialization and urbanization. From an international comparison, the level of infrastructure has still a great deal of room for further improvement, despite the rapid growth in the scale of infrastructure in China in recent years.²⁶ The government should take the opportunity to strengthen the construction of infrastructure. Especially in a macroeconomic downturn, it is important to increase the economic efficiency and effectively raise the investments in infrastructures for the transfer of agricultural labor. In the short term, infrastructure investments, as a means of the government’s expansionary fiscal policy, can boost domestic demand and prevent excessive economic decline in the context of the current economic slowdown. In the medium to long term, the expansion of infrastructure can improve the efficiency of economic operations, facilitate the transfer of agricultural labor, narrow the urban–rural income gap and create favorable conditions for a smooth economic transformation, thus laying a solid foundation for China’s urbanization and modernization. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to pay attention to optimizing the direction and structure of government-led investments in infrastructure and appropriately encourage the introduction of some private capital in the course of practice to further utilize the functions of infrastructure in improving production efficiency and income distribution.