Regional Differences and Threshold Effects of Capital-Skill Complementarity in China

On the framework of Chris and Viera (2005), this article studies the capital-skill complementarity and its regional differences of China, firstly. It is shown that there exists evidence in favor of capital-skill complementarity on the full sample of China. When we test its regional differences, we find no evidence in favor of capital-skill complementarity in the central and western regions, but strong evidence in the eastern region. Further study finds that, the “capital-skill complementarity” exists in the threshold effect. Thus, we argue that the original differences of capital-skill complementarity are relative to the economic development. These results reveal that the low-income region (such as the central and western regions) tends to allocate their capital to complement their abundance of unskilled labor but not skilled labor, but the middle-income region (such as the eastern region) shows just the opposite trend. In short, this article provides some new evidences for the nonlinearity of capital-skill complementarity and supports the viewpoint on “transitory phenomenon” of capital-skill complementarity.