Impact of Migrant Workers on Total Factor Productivity in Chinese Construction Industry

Gui Ye, Yuhe Wang, Yuxin Zhang, Liming Wang, Houli Xie, Yuan Fu and Jian Zuo
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Gui Ye: School of Construction Management and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400045, China
Yuhe Wang: School of Construction Management and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400045, China
Yuxin Zhang: College of Materials Science and Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China
Liming Wang: School of Civil Engineering, Inner Mongolia University of Science & Technology, Baotou 014010, China
Houli Xie: Chongqing Construction Technology Development Center, Chongqing 400015, China
Yuan Fu: School of Construction Management and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400045, China
Jian Zuo: School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 3, 1-18

Abstract: Total factor productivity (TFP) is of critical importance to the sustainable development of construction industry. This paper presents an analysis on the impact of migrant workers on TFP in Chinese construction sector. Interestingly, Solow Residual Approach is applied to conduct the analysis through comparing two scenarios, namely the scenario without considering migrant workers (Scenario A) and the scenario with including migrant workers (Scenario B). The data are collected from the China Statistical Yearbook on Construction and Chinese Annual Report on Migrant Workers for the period of 2008–2015. The results indicate that migrant workers have a significant impact on TFP, during the surveyed period they improved TFP by 10.42% in total and promoted the annual average TFP growth by 0.96%. Hence, it can be seen that the impact of migrant workers on TFP is very significant, whilst the main reason for such impact is believed to be the improvement of migrant workers’ quality obtained mainly throughout learning by doing.

Keywords: construction industry; migrant workers; total factor productivity (TFP); Solow Residual Approach; learning by doing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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