Employment, emerging labor markets, and the role of education in rural China

The overall goal of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing assessment of China's rural labor markets. To meet this goal, we have three specific objectives. First, we provide an update of the trends in off-farm labor participation and wages of the sample households and examine how labor market outcomes have changed for those with different levels of education. Second, we examine whether education in different time periods-the late 1980s, the early 1990s, and the mid-1990s-can be associated with increasing access to off-farm jobs. Finally, we examine how returns to education have changed during the course of the reform era. Both the descriptive data and the multivariate analysis robustly support the findings that, between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, labor markets have improved in the sense that rural workers have been increasingly rewarded for their education both in terms of off-farm job access and higher wages. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc