Abstract
Extant research pays little attention to unorganized migrant workers’ skill accumulation/upgrading from the perspective of the labor supply. This paper takes China as an example to explore the factors influencing the skill accumulation of rural–urban migrant workers (RUMWs), with the purpose of discovering how to sustain or reshape regional competitive advantages by improving RUMWs’ skill accumulation. Structured questionnaire surveys were adopted for data collection in Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province and Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province located in the Yangtze River Delta in eastern China. In total, 700 questionnaires were issued and 491 effective questionnaires were recovered. It takes the perspective of individual laborers, with special regard to the effects of localization on the laborers’ skill accumulation within the context of globalization. It adopts a broad viewpoint including intra-firm skill-biased strategy (as a response to intense competition), inter-firm relationships, and the accessibility of local non-firm organizations. The findings indicate that firms’ skill preference, which impacts employees’ skills and innovation ability and stimulates them to learn with initiative, have a significant influence on RUMWs’ skill accumulation. In terms of collective efficiency based on the co-competitive relationship between local firms, the more intensive interactions are, the more opportunities RUMWs are afforded for skill accumulation. The accessibility of local institutions and favorable policies also benefit RUMWs’ skill accumulation. In addition, the place itself, as a synthesized space of a firm’s internal labor-management relations and inter-organizational relations, also exerts an influence on and causes regional differences in RUMWs’ skill accumulation.
Highlights
Human capital growth or skill accumulation/upgrading of labor influences industrial transformation, upgrading, and reconstruction, and sustains the competitive advantage of less developed countries (LDCs), in the era of globalization [2]
The international trade literature has little discussion of the effects of localization on skill upgrading, but industrial clusters research considers that clustering conditions, which are based on the two important factors of intensive inter-firm/personal relationships and institutional thickness, are the source of regional competitiveness or advantage [53], and that it is important for individuals or firms to gain access to external knowledge for innovation or skill accumulation through interactive learning [54]
There is no multi-collinearity of variables as the variance inflation factor (VIF) scores are under 10, so the regression models are not distorted by this problem [73]
Summary
Human capital growth or skill accumulation/upgrading of labor (for ordinary laborers, skills and competencies are crucial components of human capital, and they can generate productivity, and in turn drive economic growth [1]; in this paper, the authors regard workers’ human capital as vocational skills) influences industrial transformation, upgrading, and reconstruction, and sustains the competitive advantage of less developed countries (LDCs), in the era of globalization [2]. Based on the view of comparative advantage, the Heckscher–Ohlin theorem and Stopler–Samuelson theorem (HOSS hereafter) predict that trade with or foreign direct investment (FDI) from developed countries would make developing countries specialize in labor-intensive activities and increase the demand for unskilled labor [3,4], meaning that LDCs benefit little for their skill upgrading from international trade Contrary to this prediction, another line of literature on the interlinks among globalization (export, import, and FDI), technological transfer, innovation, employment, and skill upgrading, argues that trade and FDI encourage firms in LDCs to engage in product innovation and hire workers with higher levels of skills, which sustains competitive advantages and leads to skill upgrading [5,6,7,8]. This paper integrates international economics literature with industrial clusters research (rather than focusing solely on the perspective of globalization as international economics literature does), selects the Chinese eastern coastal area, and discusses the main factors influencing RUMWs’ skill accumulation from the perspective of individual laborers on three levels: intra-firm strategy as a response to intense competition, local inter-firm relations, and the accessibility of local non-firm institutions
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