The Rural Surplus Labor Transfer On Chinese Economic Growth

Since the reform and development, along with the establishment of market economy and the rural economic system reform, the productivity of agricultural labor has improved rapidly, and then the problem of massive rural surplus-labors in the countryside become apparent. The rural labor force transfer is an inevitable law of the development of economy and society, and is inevitable trend of realizing industrialization and modernization in our country. Also the rural labor force transfer is helpful to this trend. Even more, China’s national conditions decide the more difficulty and urgency of the problem. According to development economics points of view, the process of urbanization, industrialization and modernization had become irreversible. The pattern of the dual urban-rural is bound to be replaced by the integrated development of urban and rural. In the same time, the rural-urban migration will undoubtedly play an extremely important and even crucial role in this process. One of the most prominent problems in the study of China’s rural-urban migration is the lack of theoretical foundation. The assumption of unlimited supply for rural labor force in Lewis’model and Todaro’s point that rural labor force’s transferring to urban is caused of the gap between except urban income and rural income, which was suspected by domestic scholars. So in the actual research, we have to improve traditional models. Nowadays, it is not comprehensive to research on developing countries especially like China.According to the few relevant quantitative analysis of the distribution of rural labor force and uses the way of theoretical analysis to lay the theoretical basis for this article, this paper study the mechanism of the rural surplus labor’s transfer on economic development using the labor allocation model under the Chinese urban-rural dual economic structure. The empirical results indicate that from1997to2008, the impact of the rural surplus labor’s transfer on the whole society labor productivity and GDP growth was16.33%and1.72%. Regionally, the surplus labor’s transfer on labor productivity and GDP is highest in the central region, while the western region benefits the least. With the decrease of the total amount of surplus labor and the change of the labor structure demand, it is urgent to increase the labor force skills training and improve the labor efficiency. The government should take efforts to change the mode of economic development, transform the government functions and speed up the urbanization. Meanwhile, The empirical results show that the inflation has little relationship to the unemployment, but the result is opposite to the labor transfer speed because of labor migration. So labor migration is the key factor that influents China’s economy. In order to solve the bottleneck problems of the economy, we should solve the rural-urban segmentation in urban labor market first.