지역간 노동시장 성과격차에 관한 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to find out the possible factors that cause differences in labor market performances across regions. It is well known that the factors such as industrial structure and its human capital accumulation affect labor market performances so far. Based on the review of the previous literature, we investigate structures of both labor demand and supply in each region and discuss on the short and long-run strategies that the local governments need to implement. We first estimates the wage curve which shows a negative correlation between regional unemployment rate and wage level. The estimated results indicate that inter- regional labor market performances are spreading out rather than being convergent. That is, qualitative measures such as wage level gets better as quantitative performances in the labor market improve over time. These findings suggest urgent governmental interruption into the labor market in order to reduce the inter-regional distortion. Next, we scrutinize the possible causes leading to such regional gaps and figure out that most of the differentials across regions could be explained by the industrial concentration or its specialization. These facts means that differences in industrial specialization induce asymmetric distribution of workers’ skill level and then leads to differentials both in employment and wage level. Due to these reasons, the regional and local governments so far compete to attract strategic industries that might improve the regional labor market performances. However, it is necessary that the governments supplement various productivity- boosting policies like vacational training and other public employment services besides such an effort to attract the industries. Therefore, these policy actions would result in the positive feedback between the quantitative and qualitative measures of the regional labor markets.