Lewis Turning Point Workforce Development Policy Research

During the past 30 years, China has achieved great success in social development and created an economic miracle that envies the world. The gross domestic product was raised considerably; economic structure is being refined continuously; and people's life standard rose greatly. In this process, numerous cheap labor forces have moved from low-productivity agricultural sector to high-productivity industrial sector, which contributed tremendously to China's significant social economic development.However, some new phenomenon turned up in recently years, such as labor shortage and continuous wage rising in coastal area, drawing concerns from all people from different fields. Many scholars doubt that China has already reached its "turning point", which not only will rewrite China's future social-economic development strategy, but also will influence the world production and consumption landscape.Based on the above consideration, the paper applying turning point theory, gives a specific analysis to China's labor market and points out whether the turning points have occurred in China, and if so, its time point. From the conclusion, the paper investigates the relation of China's demographic and economic changes to the Lewis turning points, and gives some pointed policy advices.The paper has six chapters. The first chapter introduces some new changes of China's labor market. The second chapter gives a brief introduction to the turning point theory, and summarizes the researches related to the topic. The third chapter, applying three indexes, analyses China's labor market and finds that the first Lewis turning point happened in 2003, while the second Lewis turning point has not yet come and is presumed to happen in 2015. Bases on the conclusion, the author gives an explanation to the labor shortage phenomenon. The forth chapter investigates the relation of China's demographic and economic changes to the Lewis turning points. In the fifth chapter, the author raises some policy advices to better accommodate Lewis turning points. The sixth chapter gives a brief summarization of the whole paper and points out some shortcomings in the paper and future research direction.