工業部門の雇用吸収力と労働移動 : アジア5カ国の事例

Abstract

The industrial sectors of Asian countries have achieved high, sustained growth over the last two decades. Their percentage contributions to GDP (ratio of industrialization) in Asian newly industrializing countries (ANICs) like Korea and Taiwan and in the ASEAN countries such as the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia have reached high levels, but the level of labor absorption between the ANICs and the ASEAN countries has been significantly different. The purpose of this paper is to examine the level of labor absorption by the industrial sector in each of the five countries mentioned above, and to analyze the impacts of labor absorption on intersectoral mobility of labor. The conclusions may be summarized as follows. The industrial sectors in the two ANICs had a high absorptive capacity which served to reduce the size of the farming population and the urban informal sector. Industrial development in Korea and Taiwan was geared to market liberalization and export promotion. Firstly, this policy stance corrected the price distortions in the factor market and led to the growth of labor-intensive industries in accordance with the factor endowments in these countries. Secondly, the expansion of labor-intensive manufactures boosted the labor absorption of the industrial sector. However, the industrial sectors in the three ASEAN countries were of limited labor absorptive capacity and were unable to absorb surplus labor in the agricultural sector or to reduce the size of the urban informal sector. Industrial development in these countries stressed importsubstitution and protectionism. This policy bias worked to reinforce price distortions in the factor market. As a result, industrialization evolved on the basis of capital-intensive technologies, which were contrary to the factor endowments of these countries and lessened the labor absorptive capacity of their industrial sectors. This defference brought about two contrastive patterns of labor mobility. In the ANICs, labor moved mainly from agriculture to modern manufacturing and service industries. In the three ASEAN countries, in contrast, massive migration of labor from rural areas to cities took place despite the weak absorptive capacity of their industrial sectors, and the bulk of such labor entered the urban informal sector. The continuous inflow to the urban unorganized service sector served to depress real wages in modern manufacturing industries.