In China, both a labor shortage and unemployment have emerged as problems in recent years. The number of university students scheduled to graduate in June 2014 is 7.27 million, increasing by 280,000 from 2013. Following 2013, at the time considered the most difficult year for job seekers in history, 2014 is seen to be even harsher. Problems in the labor market in China, a key region for Japanese companies advancing overseas, are attracting attention also in Japan. This paper provides a few perspectives on the Chinese labor market, which combines a labor shortage with challenges for job seekers.
High unemployment amid a labor shortage
Although a nationwide labor survey did not include unemployment rates (Note 1), we will look at the Chinese labor market using statistics from job placement services. According to the latest statistics on job offers and applications (Note 2), as of the January-March quarter of 2014, there were 1.293 million young job seekers who graduated in the last year or earlier but had yet to find a job through employment agencies in 102 major cities. As the population of these major cities accounts for approximately 46.7% of the total population of large and midsize Chinese cities, we can estimate that the number of young job seekers who have graduated but have yet to find a job totals more than two million in China.
Using data from the survey, I also tried to estimate the unemployment rate at those 102 major cities. The estimate used data on the working population in major cities and the number of job seekers who have not found employment (newly graduated unemployed persons and rural immigrant job seekers (Note 3)) based on the international standard set by the International Labour Organization (ILO) (Figure 1).
(For the explanation on rural migrants, see footnotes at the end of the paper (Note 5))
The unemployment rate including rural migrants in major cities in the first quarter of 2014 is 8.7%, while that excluding rural migrants is 6.9%. Unemployment rates before the first quarter of 2014 are also close to these numbers, suggesting that the high unemployment rate has continued.
First, the reason why the unemployment rate is high is not because unemployed people lack the ability to work. Looking at the age structure of all job seekers in 102 major cities (of whom 96.0% are unemployed), workers aged 45 or younger account for 89.9%, indicating a large population of young workers. In addition, 54.7% of job seekers have specialist or vocational qualifications. Regarding the type of job, 44.1% of job seekers look for technical jobs, while 25.8% seek marketing, sales, or service jobs. There still exists abundant, high-quality labor in the Chinese labor market.
Job offers still buoyant
The high unemployment rate cannot be blamed for the sluggish job offers. Despite the slower economic growth, job offers from companies are still buoyant. As indicated in Figure 2, the job-offers-to-seekers ratio in the first quarter of 2014 was 1.1, showing that there are still more job offers than job seekers.
As for the reason for the buoyant job offers, I demonstrated in my recent book (Liu, 2013) (Note 4) that labor productivity is the most persuasive of the factors that have an impact on the job-offers-to-seekers ratio in China. As shown in search theory, the larger the income earned from a job, the larger will be the rate of return gained from job creation for companies, which will result in more job offers. Given that productivity in developing countries will improve through not only technological innovations on their own but also their efforts to catch up with developed nations, a higher rate of increase in productivity can be expected. For that reason, even if the economy slows down somewhat, buoyant job offers are likely to continue because of the support for higher productivity.
Reasons why a labor shortage coexists with high unemployment
So why do labor shortage and high unemployment coexist in China? I analyzed this in my book. More specifically, I analyzed the matching efficiency in the labor market by estimating the matching function between job offers and job seekers in urban labor markets in China based on search and matching theory.
Figure 3 shows the values of matching efficiency on the vertical axis. From the figure, we realize that matching efficiency in China declined sharply from the late 1990s to the 2000s.
As a cause for the sharp decline, it is conceivable that the inflow and outflow of workers into and out of companies increased, reflecting the establishment of new companies and the disappearance and downsizing of old state-owned enterprises following economic and corporate reforms, which led to friction in the labor market. This decline was also attributable to imperfect information between job offers and job seekers. I also found that a rise in productivity has a significant negative impact on matching efficiency and showed that a mismatch has arisen between unemployed persons and companies seeking highly skilled workers. Lastly, although it was not dealt with by quantitative analysis in the book, a skill mismatch and a geographic mismatch also have some bearing on this phenomenon. For example, the job-offers-to-seekers ratio for security maintenance staff is surprisingly high in Nanjing at 4.0, while it is only 0.2 in Shanghai.
With respect to measures to improve matching efficiency, I pointed out that the matching efficiency is very high in areas where there are many employment agencies. As employment agencies are organizations that provide information mainly on job offers and job seekers, they are useful for increasing matching efficiency by correcting imperfect information. Although it is, of course, difficult to increase substantially the number of employment agencies in a short period of time, it would be beneficial for companies to put more efforts into recruiting activities in order to bring many job seekers and secure the labor force.
Although the coexistence of unemployment and labor shortage is seemingly contradictory, it exists in labor markets not only in China but also in many other countries. Even though it is impossible to eliminate imperfect information in the actual economy, there is room for improvement. If the matching efficiency in the labor market increases, it seems possible to lower both the labor shortage and unemployment.
Favorable conditions for Japanese companies in China
The main reason why Japanese companies place emphasis on overseas investments has already shifted greatly from cheap labor to local demand for products. The Survey of Overseas Business Activities of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry shows that while the percentage of Japanese companies that place emphasis on cheap labor has fallen to 21.4%, the percentage of companies that value demand for products in a country which they have entered, and its three neighboring countries, is 66.7% and 27.4%, respectively. The abundant university-educated labor force that exists in China despite the labor shortage appears to create favorable conditions for Japanese companies emphasizing the quality of human capital and innovation in an investment destination when they enter China.
