ABSTRACT
China’s rapid economic growth and technological development and, in particular, the ongoing shifts from a labour-intensive to a more skills-intensive and knowledge-based economy have created a challenge to provide sufficient highly skilled and highly educated employees, including managers. At the same time, this challenge has made more apparent existing inadequacies in meeting labour demand. More broadly, skills shortages contribute to China’s low levels of labour productivity and constrain industrial development. The low skill quality of labour supply in China has triggered a lively debate among academic researchers, policy centres and practitioners regarding the challenges foreign and domestic companies face in addressing growing skill shortages (American Chamber of Commerce 2009; ADB 2010; Cooke 2005, 2008; De Cieri and Bardoel 2009; Sankaran 2008; World Bank 2007a). Yet much of this research simply treats skill shortages as a contextual challenge rather than a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right.
