Trend Analysis of the Labor Supply and Demand in China’s Construction Industry: 2016–2025

The construction industry is an important pillar industry of the national economy in the past, and as a labor-intensive industry, the labor force is the essential element to ensure the sustainable development of this industry. With the emergence of “shortage of migrant workers”, labor shortage of the construction industry is more severe recently. Based on the industry data this paper collected, this paper using multi-scenario analysis under different hypothesis to predict the trend of both labor supply and demand for China’s construction industry from 2016 to 2025. This paper finds that the overall labor shortages of China’s construction industry will appear during the period from the end of 2016 to 2018 in different scenarios. The findings implies that there will lead to urgent needs for construction industrialization. Moreover, the shortage in labor supply relative to demand will further improve the labor cost, which is, from another perspective, a good news for construction industrialization, because the relative cost of construction industrialization would be lower.