Social mobility can not only bring positive incentives to drive employment and increase productivity, but also an important means to increase fertility willingness and fertility. At present, China's population and labor migration is mainly manifested as horizontal flow, and the vertical flow channel is not fully developed.
There are three main paths for smooth upward flow:
first
Promote a new type of urbanization with people as the core, extend and upgrade the horizontal flow of population and labor to a vertical upward mobility, and raise the income level, social identity, occupational level, education level and other aspects of individuals.
second
Promote the deepening of education, promote the matching of human capital and employment, increase the average number of years of education of the working population, extend compulsory (free) education to the preschool stage and high school stage, and improve the level of general knowledge in vocational education; strengthen on-the-job training conducted by enterprises as the main body.
third
Expand the family's time budget curve, reduce excessive overtime, socialization of housework, and let people have more free time to achieve their own development and upgrading.
——Cai Fang, Chief Expert of the National High-end Think Tank of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
*This article is the author's keynote speech at the 27th issue of the Pushan Pulpit "Analyzing Common Prosperity: Connotation and Realization Path". The article represents only the personal views of the author and does not represent the position of the forum.
How to open up the upward flow channel?
Text | Cai Fang
The theme of my talk today is how to open up the upward mobility of residents, and in fact to discuss the role of social mobility in promoting common prosperity.
Social mobility is an important way to achieve common prosperity. The report of the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forward the concept of "social mobility" for the first time: "Eliminate the shortcomings of the system and mechanism that hinder the social mobility of labor and talents, so that everyone has the opportunity to achieve their own development through hard work." ”
The tenth meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Commission held on August 17 also mentioned the issue of "social mobility" again when it was deployed to promote common prosperity in high-quality development and build a basic institutional arrangement for the coordination of primary, redistribution and tertiary distribution. The meeting stressed that "to create more inclusive and fair conditions for the people to improve their education level and enhance their development ability, smooth the upward mobility channel, create opportunities for more people to get rich, and form a development environment in which everyone participates." ”
Social mobility creates positive incentives for economic and social vitality
Why is social mobility important?
First of all, "everyone is upward" is the common prosperity, or the common prosperity means that "everyone must be upward", not some people are upward, others remain unchanged in their original positions, and even some people's situation deteriorates. The development of the socialist market economy requires competition and the survival of the fittest, but from the perspective of human development opportunities, basic rights and basic livelihoods, there can only be "winners" and not "losers".
Second, in sociology, social mobility is often defined as "an opportunity for the next generation to change their income status compared to one generation of parents." The "great Gatsby curve" proposed by the Canadian economist Miles Clarke in the name of a novel embodies the problem of social mobility, that is, the likelihood that children will surpass the economic class of their parents, and the situation of income distribution. Correspondingly, this also shows that social mobility can achieve common prosperity by changing the income status of each individual. It is also conceivable that if a couple is not optimistic about their children's future changes in social status and income status, their willingness to have children will also be reduced. Therefore, social mobility is also an important means of promoting fertility.
Third, social mobility is a positive incentive, and under the premise of social fairness and justice, social vitality is stimulated and innovation and entrepreneurship activities can flourish.
Promote a new type of urbanization with people as the core
Promotes the extension of lateral flow to upward flow
How to promote social mobility? I will focus on three targeted approaches to achieving the goal of promoting social mobility by adjusting stocks incrementally, driving horizontal flows with vertical flows, and expanding the internal volume factor outward. Specifically, there are three perspectives to start with:
The first way is to extend and upgrade the horizontal flow of population and labor to a vertical upward mobility, so that the individual's income level, social identity, occupational level, education level and other aspects are all raised upwards.
The current labour migration is generally manifested in horizontal flows, which have not yet been fully developed. As shown in Figure 1, nearly 30% of China's urban permanent population does not have urban household registration. This part of the population is mainly migrant workers. Without urban hukou, they do not have equal access to basic public services, their employment and income are unstable, and they cannot consume like real urban dwellers. Correspondingly, this part of the group has less room for upward mobility.
From the perspective of rural areas, only 66% of the rural household registration population is the permanent population, that is, more than one-third of the population does not live in the countryside, and this part of the non-resident population corresponds to the migrant workers who live in the city but do not have urban household registration. As a result of working in the cities, they no longer contribute directly to rural production. As a result of this separation of households, it has also caused left-behind women, children, and the elderly to form the phenomenon of "386199" in the countryside, and at the same time they have not been able to gain a social foothold in the cities.
Figure 1 Distribution of urban and rural population in China
In the future, China's urbanization still has huge room for improvement. China's current level of urbanization is still lower than the average of the same income group, that is, the upper middle income group. As can be seen from Figure 2, China has a great potential to move closer to the level of urbanization in the upper right of the country in the future in the process of increasing per capita GDP. This means that from the current stage of development to the per capita GDP of 23,000 US dollars by 2035, the level of urbanization in China will be significantly improved.
Figure 2 Urbanization rate and GDP per capita in some countries
The increase in the urbanization rate refers not only to the increase in the urbanization rate of the permanent population, but more importantly, the urbanization rate of the household registration population. At present, the urbanization rate of China's permanent population has reached 63.9%, but the proportion of people who really have urban hukou is only 45.5%, and there is still a gap of 18 percentage points between the two. If this gap can be narrowed, more migrant workers can obtain urban hukou, so that they can enjoy equal basic public services and have no worries, then this group can play a greater consumption potential.
According to my colleagues' estimates, even with no change in all aspects such as wages, just obtaining urban hukou can increase the consumption of migrant workers by 27%. A study by the OECD's China Research Department also shows that migrant workers can increase their consumption by 30% by obtaining urban hukou. At the same time, meeting the needs of new urban residents for affordable housing and urban infrastructure will bring huge and effective investment opportunities. The settlement of migrant workers in cities will also improve the coverage rate and equalization of social security, especially the expansion of water storage in the mutual relief pool of old-age security. In addition, urbanization can promote horizontal mobility while also setting up a social ladder, allowing migrant workers and their families to move upward in terms of education level, occupational category, income level and social identity, truly becoming a middle-income group and achieving the goal of the middle-income group multiplication plan.
Promote the matching of human capital with employment
Increase the average number of years of schooling
The second way is to promote the deepening of education and promote the matching of human capital and employment.
In the past many years, The rapid development of Education in China has mainly benefited from the popularization of nine-year compulsory education and the expansion of enrollment in colleges and universities. The new growth workforce is more educated, has a higher number of years of schooling per capita, and has higher endowments for human capital. However, the employment situation of this group with the best level of education is not ideal, and a considerable number of them belong to "flexible employment personnel" or "informal workers", and the phenomenon of learning and non-use is becoming more and more common, which is a waste of the educational resources spent and the accumulated human capital endowments, and also forms a mismatch between the supply and demand of human capital in the labor market.
In Figure 3, the abscissa represents age (0-100 years), and labor income by age is normally distributed. People earn labor income between the ages of 20 and 60, peaking at ages 30 to 40. The policy of gradually delaying retirement is expected to raise the income level of the elderly by making this curve have a fatter tail. The shorter curve represents the number of years of schooling per capita for the corresponding age group, and it is worth noting that the ages at which the two curves peak are not the same. Because the population of our country is characterized by the lower the age of education, the lack of quality of the labor force will inevitably lead to a decline in the labor force participation rate with age. In the case of delaying the retirement age, structural employment difficulties may be exacerbated, and income growth may be hindered. It can be seen that the asymmetry between human capital endowments and employment age will hinder the creation of more and better jobs, and human capital cannot be effectively combined with the labor market, which may also hinder the in-depth implementation of the new technological revolution and the sharing of results. In this regard, it is necessary to take corresponding countermeasures to increase the average number of years of education in multiple ways and improve the quality of education.
Figure 3 Labor income and average years of schooling of the population of all ages in China
The first is to change the orientation of test-oriented education, and after curbing the interference of horizontal education and training, we will focus on significantly increasing the number of years of education.
The average number of years of schooling is the average length of education per working-age population. When economists measure human capital, they often use the average number of years of schooling as a proxy variable to incorporate it into economic growth models. Most studies have found that the average number of years of schooling in the working population has a significant contribution to economic growth, in other words, the development of education has a huge role in promoting development. Therefore, under the premise of established quality, the length of years of schooling becomes very important. In this sense, what we have to do now is not to shorten the school system, as some people have said, but rather to extend the school system as much as possible.
The second is to extend compulsory (free) education to the preschool and high school stages, and to improve the level of generalization in vocational education.
In the past, the popularization of nine-year compulsory education and the expansion of enrollment in colleges and universities, which have promoted the rapid development of education in China, are two factors, the former is a huge breakthrough in improving the number of years of education, and the latter further enables more people to obtain university degrees, while the above universities are expected to attract more students to enter the high school stage, which has greatly increased the overall number of years of education in China. On this basis, in the future, if you want to further increase the number of years of education, you must have new and powerful measures. I believe that the focus should be on extending the number of years of compulsory education, or not compulsory education, but the key is free, adding three years of preschool education and three years of high school education. At the same time, when developing vocational education, we must pay attention to improving the level of general knowledge in vocational education, improve students' learning ability, adaptability and general cognitive ability, rather than just learning a skill, because the labor market is ever-changing, a vocational skill may gradually be eliminated by the market, and finally become a dragon slaying skill, but learning and cognitive ability can benefit people forever.
The third is to strengthen the on-the-job training carried out by enterprises as the main body, and improve the employment skills and labor market adaptability of older workers.
As can be seen from Figure 4, in the process of China's development from the current stage of development to the realization of future development goals, China's education development still has a long way to go. At the stage of development that china is currently in, that is, the stage where the per capita GDP reaches about 10,000 US dollars, the per capita years of education in many other countries are higher than those in China, which means that China still has great potential and needs to make great efforts to improve the average years of education of the working-age population. It can also be said that at this stage of development in our country, it is far more important to focus on the overall improvement of the average number of years of education per capita and the level of equalization of education than to pursue the global ranking of universities.
Figure 4 Average years of schooling and GDP per capita in some countries
Break the inner volume of the family time budget
Third, expand the family's time budget curve and let people have more free time to achieve their own development and improvement.
Now the phenomenon of "996" is often discussed in society, that is, excessive working hours and excessive overtime not only lead to anxiety and depression among workers, but also may cause long-term adverse effects on physical health, and ultimately create a human capital barrier to social mobility. In addition, the overburdening of domestic activities has a similar impact. Moreover, there is a close connection between the two, that is, the corporate level and the household level together compress the time budget of resident families.
According to a 2018 survey by the National Bureau of Statistics, the average daily length of urban and rural residents engaged in paid labor is 311 minutes, and the length of unpaid labor is 164 minutes, and the ratio of the two is 1:0.53, that is, the length of unpaid labor mainly for domestic work exceeds half of paid labor. Among them, paid labor, including employment, operation, transportation, etc., can be included in the SCOPE of GDP accounting under the SNA system (The System of National Accounts), while unpaid labor such as domestic work and care is a non-SNA activity and is not included in GDP, and the proportion of non-SNA activity time is quite high.
Figure 5 SNA vs. non-SNA activity time ratio
Considering the labor force participation rate in China, that is, the proportion of employment in the working-age population is high, especially the high proportion of female employment, the proportion of non-SNA activities should be very high. At the same time, women bear a heavier burden of domestic work, which hinders their social mobility. Now that we often refer to the concept of "inner volume", I believe that the burden of domestic work has precisely created the internal volume of the total household time budget, and corresponding measures should be taken against this.
One of the most straightforward conclusions, of course, is to promote the socialization of domestic work, to convert unpaid work in the household into employment activities, to convert non-SNA activities into economic output that is included in GDP, and to create new business opportunities and new economic growth points. At present, the 311 minutes of paid labor paid by residents every day correspond to the total GDP of nearly 10 trillion yuan in China, according to which it is speculated that if all unpaid labor can be converted into GDP, it can theoretically increase GDP by up to 53% (Figure 6). Of course, this theoretical maximum is unattainable, because in unpaid labor, in addition to manual domestic work, it also includes care activities for satisfying family needs and having a spiritual comfort effect, which is not suitable for full socialization. But, in any case, the space here is enormous.
Figure 6 The impact of the socialization of domestic work on GDP
In addition to this, businesses have a lot to offer in helping to expand their family time budgets. We are accustomed to understanding the third distribution of what proportion of the income for the enterprise to take out for social charity, in fact, we should pay more attention to the fact that the enterprise reflects its social responsibility in all aspects. For example, reducing unreasonable excessive overtime and changing the "996" status quo of working hours will not only not lead to the loss of productivity, but also produce win-win results for society, employees and enterprises due to the following reasons.
An increase in a family's time budget can have a variety of positive effects. First, increasing the time budget of workers and their family members to spend on tourism, shopping, etc., can boost residents' consumption and stimulate economic growth. Moreover, the growth of consumption has successively produced a multiplier effect, which in turn doubles the GDP; secondly, individual workers and family members can get more learning time, improve human capital, and further improve the quality of employment; third, the reduction of general housework can increase the time spent on childbearing, parenting, and education of children, and increase the family's willingness to have children, thereby increasing the total fertility rate; finally, leisure and entertainment itself are also important factors in enhancing happiness and the connotation of promoting common prosperity.
All in all, the core of common prosperity is the fuller and more rational sharing of the fruits of productivity gains throughout society. The horizontal movement of population and labour is one of the ways in which this is shared, while vertical mobility is the escalation and destination of horizontal mobility. From the perspective of productivity sharing and social mobility, the functions of the three areas of primary distribution, redistribution, and third distribution overlap, and the tasks to be completed complement each other, and they can all make their own contributions from the above aspects to achieve "the same way and the same destination".
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