The Spatial-temporal Effect of Labor Skill Complementation and Its Influence on Urban Wages
ZHU Jiguang
Collaborative Innovation Center of Urban-Rural Coordinated Development; Academician Laboratory for Urban and Rural Spatial Data Mining, Henan University of Economics and Law, Zhengzhou 450046, China
Abstract Based on the panel data of 287 cities in China from 2004 to 2017, this paper studies the relationship between labor skill complementation and urban wage level through the analysis of global Moran index and coupling coordination degree analysis. There are following findings. Firstly, high and low skilled labor force has a strong correlated in space, that is, it has agglomeration effect in space. However, the high and low skilled labor force in different industries has the effect of repulsion in space. Secondly, to a certain extent, high and low skilled labor force acts as mutual promotion and mutual promotion. The growth of high skilled labor force will promote the demand for low skilled labor force and expand the city scale, so as to maintain a relative balance between different labor skills in the city. Thirdly, the coupling degree of high and low skilled labor force among cities in different regions is gradually decreasing, which will be conducive to the complementary effect of high and low skilled labor force in cities. Finally, Spatial Durbin model (SDM) shows that the increase in the proportion of low-skilled labor can neither directly improve the wage level of the local region, nor indirectly raise the wages of the neighboring regions through spatial spillover effect. But it does not mean that low-end labor force has a negative effect on urban economic development. Therefore, the increase of city size leads to the existence of wage premium effect of city scale, and both high and low skilled workers will benefit from the expansion of city scale.
2021, Vol. 38 
