市场化与工资不平等增长: 变动程度及影响因素

从描述中国城市居民工资分布变动的总体趋势入手,基于完整设定的Mincer收入方程估计结果,对工资水平的增长和工资不平等程度的加深进行影响因素分解,以考察可以观测到的各个因素对中国城市居民收入分布变动的贡献.结果表明,伴随着市场化的进程,与生产力有关的特征得到了越来越高的回报,对工资不平等上升的相对贡献也越来越大,而劳动力市场隔离等制度性因素对工资不平等增加的相对贡献剧烈下降.

Marketization and Unequal Growth of Wage: Their Extent and Influence Factors

Three strictly comparable cross-section household dataset,related to 1988,1995 and 2001,are used to analyze the rapid yet unequal growth of wage and the sharp widening of wage structure.Earnings functions are compared and the increase in both the level and the inequality of wages are decomposed into their constituent elements.Distinctions are made between the variables likely to represent human capital,discrimination,and segmentation.The evidence suggests that productive characteristics were increasingly rewarded as marketization The Gini coefficient of earnings rose by 10.7 percentage points in the first phase from 1988 to 1995.Whereas the mean wage increased by 67 percent,the pay of the 10th percentile rose by only 22 percent,and that of the 90th percentile rose by 97 percent.These changes are much larger than those of the second phase from 1995 to 2001.Moreover,the returns to education rose sharply,as did the returns to occupation-specific skills.The initially slight inverse-U shape of the age-earnings profile became more pronounced: a change consistent with human capital theory.Thus the productive characteristics of workers were increasingly rewarded in the labor market.However,there were also signs of greater wage discrimination against women.Moreover,the market forces operating in the growing private sector and the relative immunity of the state sector from those forces generated greater wage segmentation among types of ownership,and provincial differences in the pace of reform and in economic growth created spatial segmentation in wages that could not be removed by the equilibrating movement of labor.Decomposition analyses were conducted in order to examine the contribution of particular characteristics to the rise in the Gini coefficient.Only a third of earnings inequality and its increase could be explained: the unobserved determinants are clearly important to the increase in earnings dispersion.The discrimination variables accounted for only a small part of the increase.The segmentation variables made the most important contribution,and that was mainly due to growing wage dispersion among provinces.This result is supported by other evidence of powerful divergence in mean earnings among provinces(Knight,Li and Zhao,2001).Some but not all components of human capital were disequalizing.These particular changes are likely to represent the stirring of labor market forces.