最低工资和经济增长

摘要

This paper examines one possible channel by which minimum wage affects regional economic growth, that is, minimum wage might have negative effect on labor intensive industries by increasing labor cost. This paper uses provinces’ panel data of manufacturing industries in China from 1999 to 2007 to do regression analysis and ifnds that in provinces that have higher ratio of minimum wage to per capita GDP, labor intensive industries would grow more slower. This conclusion proves that too high minimum wages will have disadvantageous effect on economic growth. The conclusion in this paper illustrates that it is necessary to control the growth speed of minimum wages in order to keep the growth rate of Chinese economy.%本文对最低工资影响经济增长的一种可能的机制进行实证检验，即最低工资通过提高企业的劳动力成本对劳动密集型行业产生负面影响。利用1999～2007年各省制造业细分行业面板数据，运用计量模型进行实证分析，发现在最低工资占人均GDP比重越高的省份，劳动密集型产业发展越慢。这个结论证实了过高的最低工资水平会对经济增长产生不利影响的假说。本文的研究说明为了保持我国经济的快速发展，应适当控制最低工资上涨的速度。