from monthly review......
Writing in Monthly Review, economist Minqi Li notes that since the early 1980s 150 million workers in China have migrated from rural to urban areas. China thus experienced a 13 percentage-point drop (from 50 percent to 37 percent) in the share of wages in GDP between 1990 and 2005. Now “after many years of rapid accumulation, the massive reserve army of cheap labor in China’s rural areas is starting to become depleted.” Li focuses mainly on demographic analysis, indicating that China’s total workforce is expected to peak at 970 million by 2012, and then decline by 30 million by 2020, with the decline occurring more rapidly among the prime age working population. This he believes will improve the bargaining power of workers and strengthen industrial strife in China, raising issues of radical transformation. Such industrial strife will inevitably mount if China’s non-agricultural population passes “the critical threshold of 70 percent by around 2020”..........READ MORE
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