A research on the threshold effect of human capital structure upgrading and industrial structure upgrading—based on the perspective of path dependence.

This paper considers that industrial structure upgrading (ISU) means a larger market size, however, ISU often faces huge challenges such as human capital mismatches, which directly hinder the vision of regional economic sustainable development. Through literature review, we found that the current research on the dynamic evolution of China's human capital structure is insufficient, and it is unable to give a clear evidence of the mechanism between human capital structure upgrading (HCSU) and ISU. These dilemmas make researchers difficult to restore the whole process of how the evolution of human capital smoothly embeds in industrial structure system in different regions. Therefore, we propose how the path-dependent research framework can be useful for studying the nonlinear relationship between HCSU and ISU. The results show that, regardless of China's regions or China as a whole, HCSU has a significant threshold effect on ISU. On the whole, HCSU has not plays its advantageous role in ISU. For regions, it is only in the eastern part that HCSU promotes the advancement aspect of ISU, while in other regions, HCSU has the opposite influence path. The innovation lies in that we discuss the relative relationship of different human capital and the way of its path dependence instead of focusing on the stock of a certain type of human capital, therefore we reveal the impact of the overall dynamic change of human capital structure on ISU. The significance is that as China is the largest developing country, its development model trajectory and the gap between regional economic development constitute an effective and diverse realistic scenario for the establishment of HCSU and ISU, which makes the results have high reference significance for other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]