Research On Influencing Factors Of Employment Quality In China

Employment is a major issue related to the people’s livelihood and the national economy.Governments of all countries take reducing unemployment and achieving full employment as important macroeconomic goals.After the ILO proposed the concept of“decent work”,government agencies,enterprises,and academia have paid attention to the issue of workers’rights in employment.The United Nations has therefore formulated the Sustainable Development Goal 8,which seeks to“promote sustained,inclusive and sustainable economic growth,full and productive employment and decent work for all.”It not only emphasizes full employment,but also emphasizes the quality of employment.In recent years,China’s employment situation has been generally stable.However,due to the impact of the international macroeconomic situation and policies,US trade protectionism,and domestic industrial restructuring,there are still many challenges in the field of employment.First,the pressure on total employment and structural barriers coexist;second,it is an arduous task to solve the employment problems of key groups such as college students,migrant workers,and poor and vulnerable people;third,there is insufficient protection of labors’employment rights and the problems like labor market discrimination still exist;fouth,there are short-boards in employment service,such as the weak foundation of public employment services and the low level of informatization;fifth,the intensified competition in the labor market during the transition period has challenged the employment stability and the labor skills.In order to solve these problems,the Chinese government has made a series of major policy deployments.The party’s 18^thand 19^thNational Congress report clearly stated that it must implement an employment priority strategy and a more active employment policy to promote higher quality employment.In short,at present and in the future,improving the quality of employment is an inevitable requirement and choice stemming from China’s actual national conditions,and also a major practical issue that the national macroeconomic regulation policies need to focus on.Under the macro background,this dissertation conducts an in-depth study on the employment quality,especially focusing on the influcing factors and its mechanism on employment quality,which has important theoretical and practical significance for correctly understanding the employment situation,scientifically grasping the law of employment quality development,and putting forward targeted measures to improve employment quality.This dissertation,guided by the concept of high-quality development,defines the concept of employment quality on the basis of systematically reviewing domestic and foreign literature,considers that employment quality is a macro-micro combination concept reflects the overall employment situation in a country or region,including the objective situation of the workers in the employment and the overall operation status and resource allocation of the labor market.Based on the connotation of employment quality,this dissertation constructs an employment quality evaluation index system including 2aspects,9 dimensions and 32 indicators,and uses the data from 2000 to 2017 to comprehensively measure and evaluate the employment quality in China.The study leads to some findings.As a whole,the employment quality in China has shown a fluctuating increased during the sample period,but the overall employment quality was not in a high level,and the performance among the 9 dimensions was varied greatly.At the regional level,the employment quality in the eastern region was the best;the employment quality in the central and western was in the middle,in some years,the eastern region was better than the western region while in other years it reversed;the employment quality in the northeast region was the worst,and lower than the national average.At the provincial level,the provinces with better overall employment quality performed better in all dimensions,while the provinces with poor overall employment quality performed poorly in all dimensions or experienced large fluctuations in some dimensions.The results reflect that the poor quality of overall employment quality in China is the result of the combined effects of multiple dimensions.Then,based on the in-depth understanding of the influencing factors affecting the employment quality,this dissertation constructs a theoretical analysis framework of the factors affecting employment quality,including the four dimensions of industrial development,labor market institutions,technological progress and labor quality,and discusses their mechanisms on the employment quality.This dissertation believes that the industrial development mainly affects the employment quality through the labor demand effect,the structural transformation effect and the welfare improvement effect;the labor market institutions,which involves a wide range of content,mainly enhances the multiple dimensions of employment quality by supervising and standardizing the operation of the labor market;the technological progress mainly affects the employment quality through the destruction and creation effect of employment,the structural transformation effect and the skill enhancement effect;the quality of labor mainly affects the employment quality through the income effect,the structural upgrading effect and the career promotion effect.In order to demonstrate the mechanisms proposed above,this dissertation carries out an empirical analysis.Firstly,this dissertation analyzes the impact of various factors on employment quality through regression analysis,which leads to several findings:1)in the comprehensive regression of the employment quality index（EQI）,6 of the 9 factors measuring the four dimensions of the influencing factors of the employment quality passed the significance test.Among them,5 factors have a positive effect on the employment quality.It indicated that the factors of the four dimensions do have impacts on the employment quality and the theoretical analysis is preliminarily verified;2)in the regression of the 2 aspects of labor index（LI）and labor market index（LMI）,the impact of each factor on the labor index and the labor market index is different,indicating that each factor acts on different dimensions of employment quality;3)in the regression of regions,only the regression coefficients of industry scale and labor quality are positive and significant.The regression coefficients of other factors are not only different in significant level but even different in sign,indicating that some factors have promoted the employment quality in some regions while inhibiting the employment quality in other regions.Furthermore,this dissertation constructs a structural equation model to test the mechanisms of the factors affecting the employment quality.It finds that the the hypotheses proposed in the theoretical analysis are basically verified,indicating that the theoretical analysis of the mechanisms of the factors is basically reasonable.Specifically,the economy growth has the greatest overall effect on the employment quality;the labor market institutions has the most extensive impacts on the employment quality,but the outcome of impacts are uncertain;the technological progress has significantly promoted the upgrading of employment structure,but it has a risk of losing employment opportunities;the effect of the quality of labors on the employment quality is second only to the industrial development,and the quality of labors has a dominant position on the improvement of labor compensation and welfare,as well as the improvement of workers’skills and career development;in addition,the structural equation model also finds that some dimensions of employment quality will affect other dimensions,indicading that the improvement of employment quality has a superposition effect.Finally,based on the results,the dissertation points out that improving the employment quality should follow the five guidelines:1)the government should guide the society,enterprises and individual laborers to work together to improve the employment quality;2)the government should lead to carry out the evaluation of the employment quality;3)the policies should take into account the various dimensions of employment quality and the various influencing factors;4)the policies should focus on the existing advantages of the employment quality and constantly address the short board;5)the policies should be differentiated according to regional characteristics.This dissertation also put forward four policies:1)the economic transformation policy should emphasize the supply of high-quality jobs;2)the labor market institutions should be further perfected to improve the quality of employment;3)the new technologies and new production methods should be used to promote employment structure upgrading;4)the labors should receive more education to form a high-quality talent team.