The Impact Of Labor Endowment On Skill Biased Technical Change In China

Technological progress is the source of a country's long-term economic growth,and the biases of technical change tend to affect the relative marginal product.Scholars had focused on how the bias technical changes happen since Hicks put forward the biases of technical change.In the 1970 s,there had been skill premia and wage inequality in some of developed countries;economists such as Acemoglu attributed it to the impact of skill biased technical change.Based on it,we has reviewed some literatures about biased technical change and skill biased technical change in recent years,and made a detailed analysis of how the labor endowment affect the skill biased technical change.First of all,with the proportion of skilled and unskilled labor structure as measure of a country's labor endowment,we have made labor endowment influencing factors analysis,and found that: in the opening economy,foreign direct investment and international trade development will produce a driving effect,which will change labor endowment and increase the relative demand for high-skilled labor.Secondly,with the production function based on skilled and unskilled labor inputs,we derived skill biased technical change intensity index,and found that: whether skilled and unskilled labor are complementary or substitutable,the relative increase in skilled labor of a country's labor endowment will weaken the intensity of skill biased technical change.And then we tested the theoretical hypothesis made above.With China's 1991-2014 time series data,the empirical study used vector error correction model based on Johansen estimation methodology.In the empirical analysis of the influencing factors of labor endowment,we found that: the driving effect of foreign direct investment and international trade development do change the composition of China labor endowment,and increase the relative demand for skilled labor;the impact of foreign direct investment and international trade development on China labor endowment will be a significant long-term process.In the empirical study of the impact of labor endowment on skill biased technical change,we found that the increase in skilled labor of China labor endowment would weaken the degree of skill bias in technical change,which supported the rationality of the theoretical hypothesis;with the condition of labor endowment expressed in relative structure of professional technicians,the relative increase in professional technicians would reinforce the degree of skill bias in technical change after weakening it firstly,and then make it steady gradually;With the condition of labor endowment expressed in relative structure of higher education graduates,the relative increase in higher education graduates would slightly reinforce the degree of skill bias in technical change,and then gradually weaken it,finally on a convergence process.In the opening economy,to continue expanding the scale of foreign investment and international trade will improve a country's labor endowment,promote technological progress and long-term economic growth;To strengthen the professional and technical training of unskilled labor,achieve equal education and resource allocating rationalization,and consummate the market signal transmission mechanism will effectively improve a country's skilled talents reserves,narrow the wage gap between skilled and unskilled labor,and then achieve common prosperity.