经济学院知识库

  Factor flow is conducive to the realization of regional convergence, but in reality, there are often "migration mystery" contrary to the theory: labor flow to places with higher labor productivity does not play an obvious role in economic convergence, and the development of digital economy provides a feasible path for breaking the barriers of labor mobility and solving the "migration mystery".

  Digital economy improves the skill level by endogenous enabling labor force, increases the ability of individual cross-regional flow, creates good institutional environment and industrial environment, and reduces the psychological cost and economic cost of individual cross-regional flow. In this process, the digital economy driven by labor flow reduces the pressure of the western people's livelihood and education resources, give full play to the role of the resource integration and economies of scale, to reconfigure regional per capita financial enjoyment, per capita disposable income and per capita resource output, economy in the long term realized the per capita in the sense of regional convergence.

   This paper established two areas of digital age labor location selection model, introduced how to make more individuals have more than the threshold of human capital level, that in the construction of digital system environment and digital transformation of industrial environment, labor how to reduce the psychological cost of cross-regional flow and economic cost.

   In the benchmark regression and spatial model of panel data, it is confirmed that regional convergence needs the digital economy to promote labor mobility. Among them, the labor mobility under the influence of non-digital economy makes the regional gap wider, and only the labor mobility driven by the digital economy can promote regional convergence.

   In the heterogeneity analysis, it is found that the economic gap is the strongest under the original endowment, the economic convergence trend is the weakest under the labor flow driven by digital economy, the western region expands the economic gap under the original endowment, and the economic convergence trend is the weakest under the labor flow driven by digital economy. In the context of not considering the digital economy drive, labor mobility only brings the decrease of per capita utility in the west and the increase of per capita utility in the east, and the regional gap increases, namely the emergence of "migration puzzles". When considering the development of digital economy driving labor mobility, the positive effect of per capita financial enjoyment, per capita disposable income and per capita resource output in less developed regions is stronger, and it is far greater than its improvement effect on developed regions, so that economies can achieve regional convergence in the long term and break the "migration puzzle".

   In the panel threshold model, it is found that there is a large gap in the development level of domestic digital economy, which hinders the role of digital economy in driving labor mobility in driving economic convergence. Only after the improvement of the digital level in the west, can the labor mobility simultaneously improve the per capita utility of the regions and make the cake bigger; otherwise, the labor mobility can only sacrifice the per capita utility in the west, only promote the growth of the per capita utility in the eastern and central regions, and widen the regional gap.

   It should be noted that in the context of digital economy, the employment in situ rather than outflow from the region, such as the labor force engaged in e-commerce and online customer service, does not belong to the scope of mobile labor force studied in this paper. Most of these types of workers are employed in situ, and they are in a state of maximum utilization of local development, or their individual willingness to move, or the individual skill level has not reached the level of cross-regional flow skill threshold. Even if there is no digital economy, these types of employees are more inclined to choose other local jobs. Without the interference of exogenous environment such as family factors, when the industrial scale of e-commerce employees expands, they will still gather in the areas with larger market size; when the skill level of online customer service employees improves, there will still be channels to promote to more developed areas, which is not contradictory with the mechanism described in this paper.