China’s Urban Labor Market

In the last two decades, expanding China’s urban labor market has gone through a dynamic job creation and destruction, and large-scale rural-urban immigration. The marketization since early 1980s has made great progress in the transition to a real labor market. The author offers a novel analysis of China’s labor market using modern structural econometric models. The book examines issues of the disequilibrium of labor supply and demand, job and worker reallocations, and labor market matching in China. It also looks into the impact of rural–urban immigration on the urban labor market. The author analyzes the economic reasons behind the high unemployment rate in China and explains why it coexists with the shortage of workers in recent years.

Yang Liu is a researcher at the Asia Pacific Institute of Research (Osaka, Japan). She is also a part-time lecturer at the Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University, and an invited researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University. She has a PhD in economics from Kyoto University.