Has China Run Out Of Rural Surplus Labor?

The phenomenon of Minggong Huang appeared in 2004 in China,reportedly migrant workers became scare in China.Our research based on micro and macro-data to analyze this labor shortage.Firstly,we examine the wage changes of the migrants.Using the micro-data,we find that the real wage of migrants shows an increasing trend with some years of fluctuations.When controlling for individual factors,the years effect also shows a similar pattern at the individual level.Secondly,we investigate the wage difference between rural migrant labor force and local residents in China,and we find that there is a narrowing wage difference among migrant workers,and there is also a narrowing wage difference between migrant workers and local residents.Thirdly,we estimate the ratio of marginal productivity of labor to institutional wage for the agricultural sector.Using the macro-data from Statistics Yearbook of China,we find an increasing trend of this ratio and it is larger than 1 in period 2007-2016 for the whole country.We argue that although the results cannot pinpoint which period China run out of rural surplus labor,it does show that China has run out of rural surplus labor.We also estimate the ratio for eastern,central and western regions,and the results support that eastern region in China has run out of surplus labor.Finally,we directly estimate the surplus labor in agricultural sector according to the Lewis model.The estimated number of surplus labor is decreasing and becomes negative.The decreasing trend of these numbers demonstrates the depletion of surplus labor in agricultural sector.We also estimate the surplus labor for eastern,central and western region.And again the results support that eastern region has run out of rural surplus labor.