Vivian W. Chen () (The Conference Board) Harry X. Wu () (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Bart van Ark () (The Conference Board and University of Groningen)
Abstract
Using an industry-by-region data set, based on China’s Third Industrial Census for 1995 and First Economic Census for 2004, and covering 28 industries and 30 provinces, this paper examines the trend of labor compensation (ALC), labor productivity (ALP) and unit labor cost (ULC) by manufacturing industry across regions (provinces or groups of provinces). At the aggregate level, it shows that productivity growth was generally faster than that of labor compensation and hence resulted in a significant decline in unit labor cost for all regions in China. Furthermore, compared to more developed regions, less developed regions exhibited even stronger productivity growth relative to compensation, thus leading to a convergence across regions over this period. However, we observe a substantial variation in growth rates and convergence trends across regions for individual industries. Logit regression shows that labor intensive industries are more likely to converge in productivity, compensation and unit labor cost while skill intensive industries tend to increase inequality in unit labor cost. This is confirmed by estimating a growth regression, which shows that in provinces characterized by higher skill levels of the labor force, skill intensive industries experienced faster decline in ULC.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.