行政审批改革、产业结构与劳动收入份额

The Reform of Administrative Approval System,Industrial Structure and the Share of Labor Income

行政审批改革对市场效率改进的作用吸引了众多关注,文章主要关注行政审批改革对地区产业结构演变及其对就业和劳动收入份额变动的影响。利用中国工业企业数据库,文章揭示了地方政府在产业发展中更偏向资本密集型产业,在此基础上,分析了行政审批制度改革对产业结构变动的影响与作用机制,并进一步考察了产业结构变动所引起的地区就业和劳动收入份额的变化。分析发现:行政审批改革使地区资本密集型产业比重下降,而劳动密集型产业比重上升,这一结论具有稳健性,其影响机制主要是行政审批改革降低了不同类型企业交易成本;而行政审批改革使产业的变动更符合地区比较优势,促进了地区就业和劳动收入份额的增加。文章的研究在提升就业与劳动收入份额,让增长的收益更多地惠及劳动阶层、实现包容性增长方面具有重要现实意义。

Under the Chinese government governance model,local governments have an important impact on regional economic development.One of the important manifestations is that local governments prefer to give priority to capital-intensive industries which can bring rapid economic growth through various interventions including administrative approvals.While this change in the regional industrial structure brings"structural dividends",it may deviate from the regional factor endowment.The resulting industrial structure imbalance may make it difficult to achieve other social and economic development goals such as employment,income distribution and inclusive growth.As a breakthrough point for streamlining administration and decentralization and the transformation of government functions,the reform of administrative approval system makes the means and behaviors of local government intervention in the economy face necessary institutional constraints by canceling administrative examination and approval items and reducing the approval power of local governments.The local governments’industrial development preferences are subject to certain restrictions,and the regional industrial structure will change to labor-intensive industry.With reference to the related research,this paper takes the administrative service centers established in various regions as the proxy variable for the reform of administrative approval system,and uses the Chinese industrial enterprise database to calculate the ratio of the market share of regional capital-intensive industries to the market share of labor-intensive industries in the region which is used as the explained variable.The empirical research in this paper shows that the establishment of administrative service centers can significantly reduce the proportion of capital-intensive industries in the region.The functional mechanism of the reform of administrative approval system on the industrial structure is to change the institutional transaction costs of enterprises belonging to different types of industries.The effect of reducing the transaction costs of enterprises established by administrative service centers is mainly reflected in labor-intensive industries with less impact on capital intensive industries.This paper further examines the changes in regional employment and labor income shares caused by changes in industrial structure,and finds that the reform of administrative approval system makes changes in industrial structure more in line with regional comparative advantages and promotes the increase in regional employment and labor income shares.In addition to being an important supplement to the existing research,this paper also has important practical significance.The analysis shows that the reform of administrative approval system helps to reduce the structural distortion of economic development that deviates from the comparative advantage of regional factor endowments by reducing the administrative examination and approval intervention of the local government.Furthermore,the reform helps to increase employment and the share of labor income,so that the growth benefits will benefit the working class more and achieve inclusive growth.