CCWE研究报告第二十五期:Rising Wages: Has China Lost Its Global Labor Advantage?

发表日期： 2009-07-05 12:00 | 来自研究报告 | 点击次数： 62

Rising Wages: Has China Lost Its Global Labor Advantage?^*

Dennis Tao Yang

The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Virginia Tech

Vivian Chen

The Conference Board

Ryan Monarch

University of Michigan

March 12, 2009

Abstract：

We document the trends of dramatic rising wages in China for the period 1978-2007 based on multiple sources of aggregate statistics. While real wages have increased seven-fold in the past three decades, growth has been uneven across ownership types, industries, and regions. The wages of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have increased rapidly in the past decade, and wage disparities between skill-intensive and labor-intensive industries as well as between geographic regions in China have widened considerably since the early 1990s. Based on internationally comparable data, we show that China’s manufacturing wage has converged rapidly to that of other Asian emerging markets, such as Thailand and the Philippines, but China continues to enjoy enormous labor cost advantages over its neighboring developed economies. We assess demand and supply conditions for skilled and unskilled labor in China, concluding that wage growth will stabilize to a moderate pace in the near future.

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^*The authors are grateful to Judith Banister, Gail Fosler, David Hoffman and Bart Van Ark for helpful comments and discussions on an earlier version of this paper. We would also like to thank Yuanfang Li, Xiaoqin Li, Huifang Liang, Thomas Mosk, Jessie Pang, Ke Shen and Ricky Sim for capable research assistance, including the construction of Chinese domestic and international data. Dennis Yang would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE) at Tsinghua University and the Institute of Asian-Pacific Studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Contact information: Yang, Department of Economics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Virginia Tech, email: deyang@cuhk.edu.hk; Chen, The Conference Board, Chen@conference-board.org; Monarch, Department of Economics, University of Michigan, monarchr@umich.edu.