中国的刘易斯转折点及争议

近年来，“民工荒”和劳动力工资上涨问题引发了关于中国是否已经到达刘易斯转折点的激烈争论。本文对中国刘易斯转折点的争论进行了梳理，并将其总结为四种观点。之所以产生这些分歧，既源于判断标准和依据的差异，也受到了不同统计数据的影响。但是，劳动力工资上涨的同时伴随着农村剩余劳动人口以相当比例存在的这一基本矛盾与刘易斯模型的推论并不相符。本文认为，这个矛盾是由劳动力市场分割所导致的，并且刘易斯模型并未考虑劳动力流动的制度性障碍。因此，不能直接地以经典的刘易斯理论来分析中国经济，而近年来中国劳动力市场的一些新现象亦不能简单地与经典刘易斯理论中的“刘易斯转折点”相对应。需要修正未考虑制度性障碍的二元经济理论，或者消除城乡分割影响以使得中国经验适用于经典理论模型的判断。

DEBATE ON THE LEWIS TURNING POINT OF CHINA:A REVIEW OF THEORY AND EMPIRICAL STUDY

The phenomenon of migrant worker shortage and labor wage growth in recent years had brought about a bitter controversy over the argument whether China had reached the Lewis turning point.The controversy of the Lewis turning point of China could be classified into four major categories,based on different standards and basis for judgment as well as various statistics.However,the fundamental contradiction between the labor wage growth and a high proportion of population of rural surplus labors could not deduced from the Lewis model.This paper provided a theory of serious segmentation in China’s labor market and institutional barriers for labor mobility,which ignored by the Lewis model.Therefore,the classical Lewis theory would not be a suitable theory applied in China’s labor market,which need to take institutional barriers and the urban-rural division into consideration.