The Dynamics of Wage Structure in China's Urban Labor Market:A Risk Assessment Based on a Polarization Perspective
Many developed countries are facing the issue of labor market polarization,and related discussions are gradually extending to developing countries.This paper aims to assess the risk of polarization in wage structure in China's urban labor market and provide a com-prehensive analytical framework for it.Under the framework of task-based and endogenous technical progress,the theoretical part reveals the mechanism that the direction of technical progress will be more biased to relatively abundant factors.While expanding the supply of low-skilled and high-skilled labor surplus,rural labor migration and expanding college en-rollment policy may increase the risk of wage polarization in the long run.using urban data from the China Household Income Project(CHIP)between 2002 to 2018,the empirical part examines the dynamics of the wage structure.The wage decomposition method shows that,after excluding the composition effect,the structure effect decreases monotonically between 2002 to 2013,suggesting that the wage structure has improved.The structure effect between 2013 to 2018 shows a U-shaped pattern,which means polarization are emerging.Further,the polarization index approach confirms that women generally have higher wage polariza-tion indices than men,as well as more polarized in education and contract type characteris-tics.The government thus needs to focus on such aspects in its response to the increased risk of polarization.This paper re-examines the income distribution in China's urban labor market from the perspective of polarization,and has a positive and realistic revelation for promot-ing the formation of the middle class and the common prosperity.
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