2006年12月16-18日，2006年当代劳动经济学国际研讨会在厦门举行。这次研讨会的主题为“构建劳动市场，促进经济发展和社会和谐——关注中国劳动市场”。
LEPP主任姚先国教授出席了这次国际研讨会，向研讨会提交了题为“教育、人力资源和区域经济差异：一个采用中国省级配对数据的实证分析”的论文并作了发言，还和与会专家进行了探讨。在发言中，姚先国教授分析了以人均就学水平为衡量的人力资本对区域收入差距的影响，同时就此问题比较城镇与农村地区的不同。他指出教育的确对区域人均收入水平有影响，并且相对1980 年代，其作用不断增强，但这一作用在解释区域之间的巨大收入差异方面的作用十分有限，经测算农村教育的社会回报率远远高于城镇，这一点与农村劳动力市场比城镇的劳动力市场更加市场化是一致的。此外，他还对上述结论给出了一系列解释。
参加这次国际研讨会并提交论文的还有来自北京大学、厦门大学、复旦大学、劳动与社会保障部以及哈佛、康乃尔、芝加哥大学等国内外著名学府的专家。
Prof. Yao Xianguo Attending 2006 International Symposium on Contemporary Labor Economics
2006 International Symposium on Contemporary Labor Economics was held in
Prof. Yao Xianguo, Direcdtor of LEPP, attended the symposium as one of the speakers. He submitted a dissertation named "Education, Human Capital and Regional Economic Differentials: An Empirical Test Using China's Provincial Matched-Pair Data", and made a speech on the topic. In his speech, Prof. Yao focused on human capital measured by average schooling level and its effects on regional income differentials, and investigated a comparative analysis between urban and rural areas. He pointed out that education did play a role in the regional average income level and had an increasing effect comparing with that in 1980s, but the effect seemed limited in explaining the huge income differentials across regions, besides, the estimated social return to education in rural areas was much higher than that in urban areas, which was consistent with the fact that rural labor market was more market-oriented than urban labor market. Furthermore, several explanations of the results above were presented by him as well.
There were also scholars and experts from
