Abstract: Faced with industrial transfer in Eastern China, the regional development strategies of China’s central and western regions all have such an implication of the important deployment that the industries in eastern region would transfer to the central and western regions, they hope to realize the convergence of regional economic development by inter-regional industrial gradient transfer. With the help of the factor mobility in the course of industrial transfer, this paper makes use of the data from 2000 to 2010 to conduct an empirical analysis of the inter-regional labor force transfer in China’s manufacturing sector. The results indicate that on the whole there is no large scale transfer between the eastern, central and western regions in China’s manufacturing sector. Although there is an obvious inter-regional industrial gradient transfer in the labor-intensive industries of the manufacturing sector, this transfer can only be seen from the eastern region to the central region. There is no obvious transfer in the capital and technology-intensive industries and the technology and labor-intensive industries of the manufacturing sector; the existing industrial transfers are still concentrated inside of the eastern region, but there is a tendency of industrial transfer scattering from the inside of the eastern region to the central region. Therefore, the western region has to adjust its regional development strategy and find a new acting point for its development, while the central region has to choose carefully the types of the industries to be accepted. At the same time, in order to compete with the countries in Southeast Asia, the central and western regions should pay attention to the enormous demand in the domestic markets and reduce the transaction costs of the industrial transfers when accepting the industrial transfers.

Key words: manufacturing sector; region; labor force; industrial gradient transfer