The Employment Effect And Its Mechanism Of Public Employment Service

Migrant workers are an important part of industrial workers which have made great contributions to promoting China’s urbanization and industrialization process and achieving the economic “growth miracle”.However,migrant workers have been lacking core competitiveness in the labor market due to their inferior labor endowment,household registration system and urban management system,who have been the disadvantaged group in urban employment that generally engaging in low-quality jobs with low pay,poor working environment and inadequate welfare protection.Especially under the continuous influence of the COVID-19 pandemic,the number of migrant workers in China in 2020 declined for the first time since the financial crisis in 2008,with a decrease of 5.17 million compared to 2019.In particular,the number of migrant workers going out to work decreased by 4.66 million.Migrant workers are facing increasingly severe challenges in employment.In this context,“stabilizing employment” and “preserving employment” have become the core goals of the government’s work.The 14 th Five-Year Plan further emphasizes the need to improve the public employment service system and further emphasized the need to improve the public employment service system,improve the employment security system for the disadvantaged groups,and do everything possible to stabilize and expand employment opportunities.Subsequently,the “14th Five-year Plan for Employment Promotion” issued by The State Council in 2021 clearly proposes to build a public employment service system with high efficiency,regional and national characteristics to improve the matching efficiency of labor supply and demand,thus realizing the “capacity expansion and quality improvement” of social employment and promoting employment fairness.Then,does China’s public employment service system really include migrant workers as a special group of service objects? Will it become a “new engine” for improving employment opportunities,quality and fairness for migrant workers? To clarify the above problems is of great theoretical value and practical significance for solving the current problem of inadequate and unbalanced employment of migrant workers and solidly promoting the “people-centered”new-type urbanization development and common prosperity.As a “first-line” city of reform and opening up,Shanghai has attracted rural laborers from all over China to work in Shanghai,making it a typical “importing” city for migrant workers.In order to investigate the impact of public employment services on the employment of migrant workers and its mechanism,this paper takes migrant workers in Shanghai as an example and covers the following parts.The first part is Chapters 1-2.This part first systematically describes the research background,significance,framework,contributions,innovations and shortcomings of this paper,and then composes the theoretical basis and relevant studies on the effect of public employment services and employment of migrant workers,and summarizes the basic theories and research status of existing literature,and conducts a brief literature review on this basis to provide theoretical support for the subsequent research.The second part is chapter 3,which explores the characteristic facts of migrant workers’ employment and public employment services in Shanghai,paving the way for theoretical analysis and empirical test.First,this part studys the basic characteristics of employment opportunities,employment quality,employment heterogeneity and acception in public employment services of migrant workers in Shanghai.Then,the statistical tests examine the variability of employment opportunities and employment quality of migrant workers in Shanghai in terms of public employment services.The third part,Chapters 4-6,is the theoretical elaboration and empirical analysis part.Among them,Chapters 4-5 empirically investigate the impact of public employment services on employment opportunities and employment quality of migrant workers in Shanghai based on the efficiency perspective and its mechanism.Firstly,the research hypothesis is proposed based on theoretical analysis,and then the identification strategies such as Probit model,PSM model,Heckman two-step method,and instrumental variable method are used to empirically test the data from 2015 to2020 Shanghai migrant workers’ citizenship dynamic monitoring survey,and finally the mediating effect model is applied to test the role of employment information and vocational skills in the impact of public employment services on migrant workers’ employment opportunities and employment Finally,the mediating effect model is applied to test the mechanism of employment information and vocational skills in the impact of public employment services on migrant workers’ employment opportunities and quality.Chapter 6 empirically analyzes the impact of public employment services on the employment opportunity gap and employment quality gap of migrant workers based on the equity perspective.It first empirically analyzes the heterogeneous effects of public employment services on the employment opportunities and employment quality impacts of different migrant worker groups,and measures the contribution of public employment services to the employment heterogeneity of different groups of migrant worker using the Oaxaca-Ransom decomposition model.The fourth part is Chapter 7,which is the research conclusion,countermeasure suggestions and research outlook of this paper.Based on the research findings,this section proposes countermeasure suggestions such as top-level design of public employment service system,promoting informationization and digitalization,and strengthening financial support for public employment services.Finally,it indicates the future research directions and problems based on the research deficiencies of this paper.The main findings of this paper are:(1)In terms of employment opportunities,there are significant differences in employment opportunities for migrant workers in Shanghai in terms of gender,generation,education and marriage,that the male,new generation,highly educated and unmarried migrant workers have higher employment opportunities compared with other disadvantaged groups.In terms of employment quality,the employment quality of migrant workers in Shanghai differs significantly by generation,education and marriage that new generation,highly educated and unmarried migrant workers have higher employment quality relative to other disadvantaged groups.In terms of public employment services,the proportion of Shanghai migrant workers accept the public employment services is low,only 26.9%,among which the proportions of migrant workers participating in vocational training,vocational guidance,vocational introduction,job development and other services are21.0%,17.3%,17.0%,4.6% and 6.2% in order.(2)Public employment service obviously improves the employment opportunities of migrant workers in Shanghai,and migrant workers’ participation in public employment service will increase their employment opportunities by 5.2 percentage points.Among them,migrant workers’ participation in vocational training,vocational guidance and vocational introduction will increase their employment opportunities by 6.4 percentage points,5.5 percentage points and 3.6 percentage points respectively.The mechanism test shows that public employment services have a significant promotion effect on migrant workers’ employment opportunities through employment information and vocational skills.(3)Migrant workers’ acception in public employment services will significantly improve their employment quality,and migrant workers’ acception in different types of public employment services can significantly improve their employment quality.Second,although public employment services have a suppressive effect on the employment quality of migrant workers in the job intensity dimension,they have a facilitative effect on the employment quality in the job stability and welfare protection dimensions,leading to a positive total effect of employment quality.In addition,the improvement effect of public employment services on the employment quality of migrant workers is weakening as the employment quality increases,indicating that public employment services tend to protect the group of migrant workers with relatively lower employment quality.Finally,mechanism tests show that public employment services significantly improve migrant workers’ access to employment information and vocational skills,which in turn have a significant promotion effect on migrant workers’ employment quality.(4)Public employment services have significantly higher employment opportunity enhancement effects on female,older generation,lower education and married migrant workers than on other groups,and reduce the gender,generation,education and marriage gaps in migrant workers’ employment opportunities,with contribution rates of-16.5%,-24.6%,-11.7% and-21.3%,respectively.In addition,public employment services improve the employment quality of older generation,low-education and married migrant workers more than other groups,and significantly reduce the generation,education and marriage gaps in the employment quality of migrant workers,with contribution rates of-9.9%,-4.0% and-22.1%,respectively.The above results indicate that public employment services have a “bottom-up” characteristic for disadvantaged employment groups.The main innovation of this study is to systematically evaluate the impact and mechanism of the public employment service system on employment opportunities,employment quality and employment gap of migrant workers in China,and to verify that the employment effect of public employment service has the effect of “expanding capacity and improving quality” and alleviating the employment gap between different groups,forming an employment effect that is both efficient and fair.The employment effect of public employment services has been verified to have the effect of “expanding capacity and improving quality” and alleviating the employment gap between different groups,forming an employment effect that is both efficient and fair.This study not only expands the theory of public employment service and employment of migrant workers,but also provides scientific theoretical guidance and practical evidence for improving the public employment service system in China and solving the employment difficulties faced by migrant workers and other“difficult-to-employ” households.