企业劳动力成本与全要素生产率——“倒逼”机制的考察

Firm Labor Costs and Total Factor Productivity:A Study of "Forced" Mechanisms

针对近期引起普遍关注的劳动力成本上升问题,本文利用2002—2013年上市公司样本探索劳动力成本上升是否能"倒逼"企业转型升级,进而提升全要素生产率。研究发现:(1)劳动力成本的上升促使企业提高了整体生产效率,表现为全要素生产率的提升。(2)劳动力成本上升对于企业生产率的促进作用在非国有企业和劳动密集型企业中更加显著。(3)我们对机制的探索发现,技术创新是劳动力成本上升"倒逼"企业转型升级的重要路径。研究结果表明,在客观上,趋势性上升的劳动力成本对于企业转型升级产生了积极的影响,政府应着力推进劳动力资源的市场化配置,提高企业参与全球市场竞争的积极性,提升企业生产要素的使用效率以驱动可持续增长。

The rise of labor cost has attracted extensive attention recently,this paper aims at exploring whether the rising labor cost force the transformation and upgrading process of firms,and then improve TFP.We find that firms with labor cost increasing become more likely to improve production efficiency;The effect will become more significant in NonSOEs and labor-intensive enterprises. Moreover,the evidence supports our interpretion of the mechanism：TFP is drived by positive technical advance when the labor cost is increasingly rising.This paper shows that the labor cost will be rising as a long-term trend and it will also positively affect TFP in the firm-level. The government should focus on promoting market-based allocation of labor resources,improve the enthusiasm of enterprises to participate in global market competition,promote the usage efficiency of production factors to drive sustainable growth.