政府就业增长目标、民生保障性财政支出偏好与稳就业效应

Abstract

Employment growth target is an important employment institutional arrangement in China. Does the government's increase in employment growth target prompt enterprises to increase recruitment, and will it adopt strategic recruitment? For a long time, local governments have had the distortion issue of fiscal expenditure structure that prioritizes production investment over livelihood protection. Can government employment targets rectify this problem directionally? This paper characterizes the interactive relationship among government employment targets, fiscal expenditure preferences for livelihood protection, and enterprise recruitment within a sequential game framework. It empirically tests this using manually collected data on urban new employment targets from 1,967 prefecture-level city government work reports, unique data from Chinese local government fiscal budgets and final accounts, and nearly 58 million online recruitment records. The findings are as follows: (1) An increase in local government employment growth targets significantly promotes enterprise recruitment, exhibiting a stable employment effect, which operates primarily through increased employment subsidies. (2) Government employment targets prompt enterprises to recruit high-skilled labor, generating a human capital upgrading effect, while also ensuring the recruitment of low-skilled labor, exerting an inclusive employment effect. (3) Since employment targets incentivize governments to fulfill their stable employment commitments, the effect is more significant in regions with initially lower preferences for livelihood-related fiscal expenditure, indicating that employment targets can directionally correct the distortion of fiscal expenditure structure. (4) Enterprises genuinely increase the number of employed persons rather than engaging in strategic recruitment behaviors such as 'hiring without employing', 'hiring new and firing old', or imposing '35-year-old age thresholds'. Cost-benefit calculations also show that the benefits of employment subsidies invested to meet employment targets outweigh the costs, meaning the policy balances social and economic benefits, albeit dependent on target form and policy environment. This study is significant for understanding and optimizing the employment target system and preventing large-scale unemployment risks.