Читать книгу China's Rural Labor Migration and Its Economic Development - Xiaoguang Liu - Страница 6

In less than 40 years of reform and opening-up, China’s economy has changed dramatically, with more than a 200-fold increase in the nominal GDP and even more than a 30-fold increase in the real GDP after the exception of the price factor. Throughout the history of mankind, China’s economy has grown at an unprecedented rate, eclipsing numerous ingenious growth theories. In 2016, China became the world’s second largest economy with a GDP of nearly RMB 75 trillion, but its growth rate still ranked first in the world, making a great impression on many economists.

In the miracle of China’s economic growth, the great changes on the labor market undoubtedly play a vital role. Compared with the previous vigorous market-oriented reform of state-owned enterprise (SOE) employees, China’s agricultural labor force has a larger scale of transfer, a longer duration and a more far-reaching impact, but it has not been duly valued and studied. In 2016, the total number of migrant workers exceeded 280 million, accounting for 36.3% of the total number of the population with employment and 68.1% of the urban population with employment in China. It is really a “very large but special” group. To a large extent, it can be said that the academic community has just a relatively superficial understanding of the role of the group in China’s economic development, and knows little about the social benefits that the group enjoys in cities. More importantly, much of the academic research assumes or believes, to varying degrees, that they just provide an element of cheap labor for the industrial development of urban sectors. Such wrong recognition is especially prevalent in reality. Even faced with the continuous slowdown in the transfer of agricultural labor in recent years, many cities are still reluctant to make the basic benefits of citizens that the group deserves accessible to the group. One of the reasons is no doubt the serious underestimation of the group’s role in and contribution to urban development, regardless of any considerations.

This book aims to clarify the role of the transfer of agricultural labor in China’s economic development rather than the labor element provided to the urban sectors. The continuous large-scale transfer of agricultural labor to cities changes the fundamental characteristics of China’s labor market, profoundly affects China’s investments, savings, technological progress and economic cycle fluctuation, and more importantly, plays an important and special role in the rapid development of non-agricultural industries. To illustrate it, this book first systematically presents the three most important characteristics of China’s economic development, involving China’s investment, savings and economic growth, and respectively summarizes them as the riddle of China’s rising return on capital, the riddle of China’s rising rate of saving and the riddle of “Okun’s law” not applicable to China. Solving these issues is the key to understanding China’s model of economic development. This book comprehensively explains the three riddles of development from the perspective of the transfer of agricultural labor through theoretical and empirical analysis. One of the important practical implications of this book is that the impact of the current slowdown or even stagnation in the transfer of agricultural labor on China’s economy is not only marginal but also directional. If it is expected to maintain fast economic growth, it is absolutely a sensible choice to put more effort into promoting the transfer of agricultural labor at both the national and urban levels. It is not only out of fairness but also for the development of the city itself to give due recognition to the contributions of migrant workers to urban construction.

Liu Xiaoguang

Research Building of Renmin University of China January 2017