ABSTRACT
Since executing economic reform and an open policy in the late 1970s, the Chinese economy maintains a high annual growth rate and technology innovation has also been improving. Technology adoption promoted economy growth, at the same time it exerted a great impact on employment quality and skill structure. Changes in employment quality and skill structure means a lot for China. We want to know if our future economic development demands more or less labour and more or less skilled labour. This will shed light on our educational development and the firms’ training programmes. If the technological change has some adverse impact on employment, how can we coordinate the dilemma of relative backward technology and a high unemployment rate during the economic development period? Further technological change coincided with institution innovation in China. During the transitional process many previously state-owned enterprises were reformed into shareholding enterprises, combined with foreign companies or have been privatized. Do different ownership enterprises perform differently in the process of technology adoption and exert different impacts on employment? Answering these questions needs us to conduct some empirical analyses. This chapter tries to investigate the impact of technology input expenditure on the employment quantity and skill structure from the perspective of the manufacturing industry.
