中国劳动力短缺的时代真的到来了吗——基于产业后备军理论的存量和流量分析

Does the Era of Labor Shortage in China Really Come?——Stock and Flow Analysis Based on Industrial Reserve Army Theory

随着民工荒、人口老龄化与制造业“东南飞”现象的出现，学术界为中国劳动力是否短缺争论不休。刘易斯拐点论和人口红利论看似为解释该问题提供了理论基础，但其结论随经验估算方法和对理论解读的不同而相去甚远。本文以马克思的产业后备军理论为基础，将宏观统计数据和微观数据库结合起来，估算了199l-2015年中国产业后备军的变化情况，结果表明，尽管中国产业后备军的数量在减少，但其数量仍多达2亿人左右，而且其下降趋势存在逆转的可能，现在谈中国劳动力短缺为时尚早。

With the emergence of the shortage of migrant workers, the aging of the popu｜ation and the phenomenon of ＂southeast fly＂ in manufacturing, academics debate endlessly about whether China＇s labor torte is in short supply. The Lewis turning point and demographic dividend seem to provide a theoretical basis for explaining the issue, however, its conclusions dif- fer as a resuh of different empirical estimation and theoretical interpretation. Based on Marx＇s theory of reserve army of labor, this paper combines macroeconomic data and micro-database to estimate the change of China＇s reserve army of labor from 1991 to 2015. The resuhs suggest that although reserve army of labor in China is decreasing, its size is still about 200 million and its downward trend may be reversed. It is too early to assert that China has reached the era of labor shortage.