Employment absorption is a central indicator of whether regional economic expansion is translated into broader welfare. This study examines the effects of economic growth, minimum wages, investment, and human resource quality on labor absorption in Jambi City. The study uses annual secondary data for 2014–2025 from Statistics Indonesia (BPS) and official Jambi City Government documents. The 2016 observation for employment is unavailable at the city level because the National Labor Force Survey did not produce district/city estimates; therefore, the regression uses 11 observations. Labor absorption is measured by the number of employed persons, while human resource quality is operationalized by mean years of schooling as the education dimension of human development. Estimation uses a log-linear Ordinary Least Squares model. The conventional OLS results yield R²=0.817, adjusted R²=0.695, and F=6.684 (p=0.021). Minimum wage has a positive coefficient and is significant under conventional standard errors (β=0.3715; p=0.036), while economic growth, investment, and mean years of schooling are not individually significant. However, HC3 robust standard errors weaken individual significance, and multicollinearity between wage and schooling is relatively high. The findings should therefore be interpreted as exploratory associations rather than causal effects. Policy should emphasize employment-intensive growth, productive investment, and closer alignment between skills and local labor demand.
Copyrights © 2026