The Effects Of Import-export Trade On Labor Shifts Among Three Industries In China

In2012, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pointed out:all levels of the government must insist on the priority strategy of employment and implement more active policies in order to create more jobs in "Chinese government work report". At present, increasing employment and optimizing employment structure are main targets of our country economic society development. With the development of world globalization, solving China’s employment problem can not only depend on domestic expense and investment, but also rely on international trade and FDI. This paper aims to study the effects of import-export trade on labor shifts among three industries.Since the reform and opening up, China’s import-export trade develops rapidly. While the total volume of trade increases, the trade structure becomes more reasonable. The total volume of foreign trade in goods was3642.06billion dollar in2011which was1.225times as much as that in the last year. The industrial finished products trade occupied0.5785of the total trade in1980and the proportion reached to0.827in2010. Meanwhile, service trade developed rapidly. In2010, the total volume of service foreign trade was362.4billion dollar, accounting for5.1%of the world total service trade. Recently, China’s employment increases rapidly and employment structure becomes more reasonable which are similar to the trend of China’s foreign trade. The proportions of second and third industries’employment increased dramatically, especially for the third industry. From1978to2010, the proportion of the third industry rose from0.122to0.346.The import-export trade exerts important influence on employment. According to the former theory and the research literatures, the export trade promotes the increase of employment while the effects of import trade on employment are uncertain. On one hand, the import trade increases the competition of relative industries which will eliminate our country’s unenlightened productivity and reduce China’s employment. On the other hand, import trade will increase total output and promote employment through productivity spillovers etc. Therefore, what’s the relation between import-export trade and labor shifts among three industries in China? What’s about the direction and degree of the effects? These issues attract more concern than before.This paper overviews the literatures about the relationship between trade and employment firstly. And then the paper analyses the mechanism of the effects of trade on labor shifts based on the former literatures. For the empirical analysis, this paper uses China’s overall time-series data from1985to2009and the panel data of China’s eastern, central and western regions from1994to2009to analyze the effects of import-export trade on labor shifts among three industries and the regional difference. The results show that:from the country side, import and export trade make the labor shift from the primary industry to the second and third industries. There are obvious differences of the effects on labor shifts among three industries in different regions. Import-export trade in eastern region make the labor shift from the primary and third industries to the second industry while Import-export trade in central region make the labor shift from the third industries to the primary and second industry. For the western region, employment transfers from the second industry to the primary industry because of the Import-export trade. This paper also analyses the reason of the differences among three regions.Based on the above conclusions, this paper puts forward several suggestions to make the import-export trade play full role in optimizing employment structure, which includes the following three points:improving the export of second and third industries based on the export situation; optimizing import structure in order to make use of productivity spillovers; speeding up economic development and trade structure optimization of central and western regions.