中国劳动力短缺的原因后果及影响.pdf

Macroeconomy Report March 18, 2010 China RESEARCH Jiming HA The Causes, Consequences, Implications SFC CE Ref: AKS658 hajiming@ Ziqiang XING of China’s Labor Shortage SFC CE Ref: ART864 xingzq@ Jian XU xujian2@ Highlights: Our analysis found that the labor shortage is currently still a regional phenomenon, mainly concentrated in the export processing industry in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and southeast Fujian, while a much greater proportion of migrant workers are now going to central/western China. In the short term this supports our call for more balanced regional growth in China: Inland provinces are absorbing more migrant workers as more jobs are created there and the wage gap between inland and coastal regions narrows. But the more deeply rooted reason is that China’s demographic dividend is moving toward the 2015 turning point, with migrant workers of the baby boom generation already in their middle age and the new generation of migrant workers (born in the 1980s) having higher requirements for wages and working conditions. The rural labor surplus is now merely 50mn people, and China will face its Lewis Turning Point in several years. It still needs another few years for the labor shortage to develop into a nationwide problem. Implications for investors: Labor compensation will likely increase as a percentage of national income, promoting household consumption and industrial structure upgrading. Currently China’s demographic structure resembles Japan’s in the 1980s, when Japan’s household consumption to GDP ratio hit an upward inflection poi