IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-39726-3_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Turning Point in the Labor Surplus Economy: Concept and Approach

In: Lewisian Turning Point in the Chinese Economy

Author

Listed:
  • Ryoshin Minami

Abstract

In 2004 it was reported in Chinese media that migrant workers became scarce in the coastal urban areas and this pushed up their wages. At the same time, concerns were expressed about the possible negative effects on economic growth. China has long been heavily dependent on exports and foreign capital inflows: wage increases could deteriorate its global competitiveness in exports, thereby also discouraging capital inflows in the country. The migrant labor shortage, referred to as mingong huang , raised a heated debate among economists as to whether China had passed the Lewisian turning point (TP). However, there has been no reasonably comprehensive account of migrant worker shortages in urban areas, nor is there any empirically verifiable study on this issue. The Lewisian TP is a theoretical point in time in the Lewisian dualistic economy model when surplus labor in agriculture disappears due to its integration into the higher wage urban industries. Thus, the demarcation of TP cannot be determined without a methodologically valid empirical analysis of employment in agriculture and in urban industries.

Suggested Citation

  • Ryoshin Minami, 2014. "Turning Point in the Labor Surplus Economy: Concept and Approach," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Ryoshin Minami & Fumio Makino & Kwan S. Kim (ed.), Lewisian Turning Point in the Chinese Economy, chapter 1, pages 3-14, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-39726-3_1
    DOI: 10.1057/9781137397263_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-39726-3_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.