Labor Market Outcomes and Reforms in China
Labor Market Outcomes and Reforms in China
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DOI：
10.1257/jep.26.4.75
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发表时间：
2012-09-01
影响因子：
8.4
通讯作者：
Meng, Xin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Meng, Xin
在过去几十年的经济改革中，中国的劳动力市场已经转型为一个日益市场化的体系。中国有两个隔离的经济体：农村和城市。理解这种鸿沟不断变化的性质，可能是理解过去几十年和未来几十年最重要的劳动力市场改革问题的关键。从1949年开始，中国经济几乎不允许农村和城市之间的劳动力流动。城乡隔离是通过一种名为“户口”的户籍制度实施的。出生在农村的个人拥有“农业户口”，而在城市出生的人则被指定为“非农户口”。在农村，就业和收入与以公社为基础的生产制度挂钩。集体所有的公社为医疗、教育和养老金提供了非常基本的保险。在城市，实行国家规定的终身就业、中央确定的工资标准和从摇篮到坟墓的社会福利制度。20世纪70年代末，中国开始了经济改革，但农村和城市劳动力市场的变化时机和模式截然不同。本文重点研究了城市劳动力市场中的就业和工资，通过迁移而产生的城乡劳动力市场之间的互动，以及未来劳动力市场面临的挑战。尽管发生了显著的变化，但遗传的制度障碍仍然在劳动力配置中发挥着重要作用；户口制度仍然存在，中国人口中仍有72%的人是农村户口持有者。中国必须继续放宽对农村地区的限制，农村地区是城市移民的一个因素，必须采取政策缩小城乡教育差距，否则就有可能同时承受日益增长的城市地区的劳动力短缺和日益加深的城乡经济差距。
Over the past few decades of economic reform, China's labor markets have been transformed to an increasingly market-driven system. China has two segregated economies: the rural and urban. Understanding the shifting nature of this divide is probably the key to understanding the most important labor market reform issues of the last decades and the decades ahead. From 1949, the Chinese economy allowed virtually no labor mobility between the rural and urban sectors. Rural-urban segregation was enforced by a household registration system called "hukou." Individuals born in rural areas receive "agriculture hukou" while those born in cities are designated as "nonagricultural hukou." In the countryside, employment and income were linked to the commune-based production system. Collectively owned communes provided very basic coverage for health, education, and pensions. In cities, state-assigned life-time employment, centrally determined wages, and a cradle-to-grave social welfare system were implemented. In the late 1970s, China's economic reforms began, but the timing and pattern of the changes were quite different across rural and urban labor markets. This paper focuses on employment and wages in the urban labor markets, the interaction between the urban and rural labor markets through migration, and future labor market challenges. Despite the remarkable changes that have occurred, inherited institutional impediments still play an important role in the allocation of labor; the hukou system remains in place, and 72 percent of China's population is still identified as rural hukou holders. China must continue to ease its restrictions on rurala is an element of urban migration, and must adopt policies to close the widening rural-urban gap in education, or it risks suffering both a shortage of workers in the growing urban areas and a deepening urban-rural economic divide.