China's Human Resources Development : Recent Evolution and Implications for the Global Market

Our purpose in this article is to develop a framework for studying organizational arrangements used by Chinese Global firms in allocating work and managing human resources in the international context. Our framework based on human capital theory, transaction cost economics, and resource-based view of the firm investigate four factors: institutional, demographic, legislative, and educational changes in China, drawing some of the main challenges in Human Resources Management (HRM) for both Chinese and foreign firms. The paper contains a brief review of literature concerning the role of human capital in economic growth, then it focuses on the recent evolution of the Chinese labor market, and finally, it draws some implications for human capital management in China from global point of view. Our general framework contribute: first, to the formulation of research hypothesis of convergence (or divergence) of HRM practices in global markets, second, it emphasizes the relationship between the institutional and country's specificities of labor market and the HRM, and last it shows some effects of institutional policies and reforms on the quality and the availability of human capital China. These three points seem to support a broad idea of competitiveness based on labor market efficiency and how the internationalization strategies depend on the sources of human capital