Abstract: Employment is not only the greatest livelihood, but also the most basic support for economic development. Clarifying China’s global value chains (GVCs) employment, and its changing mechanism would shed light on how to achieve higher quality and fuller employment in the future. Under the global input-output accounting framework, the method of Reijnders & de Vries (2018) to measure the production technology of various industries in various countries based on the hypothesis of national productivity is improved, and the total factor productivity of national industry level is introduced by our paper. China’s GVCs employment change under global value chains at the aggregate, industry and skill levels are then comprehensively measured and analyzed. The chaining structural decomposition analysis (SDA) is further adopted to explore the roles of TFP, labor input coefficient, intermediate input outsourcing, final demand outsourcing, the product structure of final demand and final demand scale. The proposed accounting framework is then applied to empirical analysis using the world input-output tables released in 2016 and the matched employment data, covering the period from 2000 to 2014. Of course, the world input-output tables released in 2013 and the matched employment data at the skill level, covering the period from 2000 to 2009, are also used. Our findings suggest that the scale of China’s GVCs employment growth is obvious at the both aggregate and industrial levels. After China’s entry into WTO, the service industry attracts more investment, and achieves faster growth than the manufacturing industry. In addition, the working hours of skilled workers increased significantly, while that of low skilled workers extended the most. The decomposition results show that the growth of China’s employment is mainly driven by the expansion of final demand scale. In contrast, technological progress has significantly inhibited China’s employment growth, and compared with the increase of TFP, the decrease of labor input coefficient has a stronger inhibitory effect. Outsourcing is overall beneficial to China’s employment growth, and compared to intermediate input outsourcing, the employment promotion effect of final demand outsourcing is significantly greater. Taking industry and skill jobs into consideration, the above results show heterogeneities. The findings of this paper shed light on the realization of full and high-quality employment in China.

Key words: global value chain; employment change; structural decomposition analysis; technology effect; offshoring effect