The Influence Of International Trade On China’s Employment Structure

The international trade of China has developed rapidly since the Reform andOpening. The value of China’s import and export increased nearly200times from1978to2013, and reached$4trillion in2013which exceeded the U.S.and rankedfirst in the world.The import and export value of goods once again step into a newlevel of one trillion U.S. Dollars. The contribution of China’s net exports to GDPgrowth remained at around10%in recent years, which proves that international tradehas become an important guarantee to promote the development of China’s economyand has created many employment opportunities. China’s employment populationwas583.6millions in1991,which increased into767.04millions in2012,and thenumber of new jobs in town was7.25millions in the first half of2013showingreverse growth trend,but China’s employment situation remains grim.China’sunemployment rate in city and towns increased into4.3%after the impact of thefinancial crisis of2009, and the registered unemployment rate in city and towns in2012was4.1%. Employment is vital to people’s livelihood which also is an importantgoal of national macro-control. The promotion of employment not only is to improvethe amount but also is to optimize the structure. China’s structural unemploymentproblem is serious currently, and the industrial distribution and regional distributionof employment is also very unbalanced.Thus, under high dependence on foreign trade,the study of the impact of international trade on employment and its structure willhelp to improve foreign trade policy, improve the breadth and depth of internationaltrade, optimize the structure of domestic employment, promote the deepening ofreform and sustainable development of national economy.Based on the domestic and foreign literatures, the summarizing on internationaltrade and employment theories, and the analyzing of China’s foreign trade andemployment situation, this thesis establish a dynamic panel data using the relevantdata of31provinces to have a comprehensive study of China’s foreign trade’s impacton employment. First, this paper is composed of five parts. The first part is anintroduction including background and significance, research methods and the maincontent, and lack of innovation. The second part is a literature review including the changes in the employment structure theory, empirical analysis about the impact ofinternational trade on employment structure and commentary of existing researchresults. The third part analyzes the evolution of China’s international tradedevelopment and employment structure which includes the basic theory betweenthem and analyze the problem will be faced when international trade pull China’semployment.The fourth part including the examine of the impact of internationaltrade on employment derived from the theoretical model and the empirical analysis ofthe impact of international trade on China’s total employment and industrialdistribution and regional distribution of the employed population. The fifth part isconclusions and policy recommendations.The empirical results show that:First,China’s export has a significant positive effect on employment, but the extent islesser, while China’s import has a significant negative effect on employment; second,exports have a significant positive effect on China’s three major industries, and theimpact of export on the first industry’s employment quantity is bigger than the secondand the third industry’s; third, the import has a significant negative effect on the threemajor industries, but the import has the greatest impact on the western employment;fourth, international trade has different influence on China’s three major regionalemployment, and import and export merely has a significant impact on the westernemployment.Finally, making a policy recommendations to improve international tradeand promote employment according to the analytic results.