Labor Market Vulnerability in Urban China

Abstract

The Chinese labor market has been facing a significant transition. As evidenced by frequent labor shortage and rising wages for migrant workers, it is believed that China has already passed through the Lewis Turning Point. This labor market change affects the quality of jobs through several channels.

This paper introduces the main labor market developments in recent years in China, including rural to urban migration, trend of informality, social protection system, and recent developments in labor market institutions. The following section tries to measure the vulnerability in the urban labor market by introducing a new measurement in social security and job security. Section four describes the vulnerability of jobs using the new tools we developed and observe the vulnerability variations across various groups of workers. A regression-based decomposition is applied to analyze the sources contributing to job vulnerability.

Citation

Cai Fang; Du Yang; Qu Yue. Labor Market Vulnerability in Urban China. Institute of Population and Labor Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (IPLE-CASS), Beijing, China (2012) 30 pp.

Published 1 January 2012