IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/intlab/v158y2019i3p489-508.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Outsider ethnic minorities and wage determination in China

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew W. MACDONALD
  • Reza HASMATH

Abstract

While some studies on urban ethnic minorities in China indicate that they earn lower wages relative to the Han majority, others show little evidence of this gap. To understand this contradiction, the authors propose that the primary issue is a failure to fully disaggregate ethnic minority groups’ labour market experiences. Leveraging a large data set looking at China's ethnic minorities, findings suggest that “outsider minorities”, such as Tibetans and Turkic groups, suffer a significant wage penalty when controlling for covariates, while minorities in aggregate do not. These findings are robust across various specifications and have notable theoretical and policy implications.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew W. MACDONALD & Reza HASMATH, 2019. "Outsider ethnic minorities and wage determination in China," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 158(3), pages 489-508, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:intlab:v:158:y:2019:i:3:p:489-508
    DOI: 10.1111/ilr.12074
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12074
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ilr.12074?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yang, Dennis Tao, 2005. "Determinants of schooling returns during transition: Evidence from Chinese cities," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 244-264, June.
    2. Reza HASMATH, 2011. "From job search to hiring and promotion: The labour market experiences of ethnic minorities in Beijing," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 150(1-2), pages 189-201, June.
    3. Reza Hasmath, 2008. "The big payoff? Educational and occupational attainments of ethnic minorities in Beijing," The European Journal of Development Research, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 20(1), pages 104-116.
    4. Emily Hannum & Yu Xie, 1998. "Ethnic stratification in Northwest China: Occupational differences between Han Chinese and national minorities in Xinjiang, 1982–1990," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 35(3), pages 323-333, August.
    5. James J. Heckman & Lance J. Lochner & Petra E. Todd, 2003. "Fifty Years of Mincer Earnings Regressions," NBER Working Papers 9732, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Jacob Mincer & Boyan Jovanovic, 1981. "Labor Mobility and Wages," NBER Chapters, in: Studies in Labor Markets, pages 21-64, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Margaret Maurer-Fazio, 2012. "Ethnic discrimination in China's internet job board labor market," IZA Journal of Migration and Development, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 1(1), pages 1-24, December.
    8. Barry Naughton, 2007. "The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262640643, December.
    9. Zang, Xiaowei, 2008. "Market Reforms and Han-Muslim Variation in Employment in the Chinese State Sector in a Chinese City," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(11), pages 2341-2352, November.
    10. Björn Gustafsson & Ding Sai, 2009. "Temporary And Persistent Poverty Among Ethnic Minorities And The Majority In Rural China," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 55(s1), pages 588-606, July.
    11. Huhua Cao, 2010. "Urban-Rural Income Disparity and Urbanization: What Is the Role of Spatial Distribution of Ethnic Groups? A Case Study of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Western China," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(8), pages 965-982.
    12. Appleton, Simon & Song, Lina & Xia, Qingjie, 2005. "Has China crossed the river? The evolution of wage structure in urban China during reform and retrenchment," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 644-663, December.
    13. King, Gary & Honaker, James & Joseph, Anne & Scheve, Kenneth, 2001. "Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 95(1), pages 49-69, March.
    14. Margaret Maurer-Fazio & James Hughes & Dandan Zhang, 2007. "An Ocean formed from one hundred rivers: the effects of ethnicity, gender, marriage, and location on labor force participation in urban China," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(3-4), pages 159-187.
    15. King, Gary & Nielsen, Richard, 2019. "Why Propensity Scores Should Not Be Used for Matching," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 27(4), pages 435-454, October.
    16. Reza Hasmath, 2019. "What explains the rise of majority–minority tensions and conflict in Xinjiang?," Central Asian Survey, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(1), pages 46-60, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Iwasaki, Ichiro & Ma, Xinxin, 2020. "Gender wage gap in China: a large meta-analysis," Journal for Labour Market Research, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany], vol. 54, pages 1-17.
    2. Hou, Yue & Liu, Chuyu & Crabtree, Charles, 2020. "Anti-muslim bias in the Chinese labor market," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 235-250.
    3. Iwasaki, Ichiro & Ma, Xinxin, 2020. "Gender Wage Gap in China: A Large Meta-Analysis," CEI Research Paper Series 2020-5, Center for Economic Institutions, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gustafsson, Björn Anders & Yang, Xiuna, 2015. "Are China's Ethnic Minorities Less Likely to Move?," IZA Discussion Papers 9018, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Jiaping Wu, 2014. "The Rise of Ethnicity under China's Market Reforms," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(3), pages 967-984, May.
    3. Mishra, Vinod & Smyth, Russell, 2013. "Economic returns to schooling for China's Korean minority," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 89-102.
    4. Howell, Anthony, 2017. "Impacts of Migration and Remittances on Ethnic Income Inequality in Rural China," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 200-211.
    5. Gustafsson, Björn Anders & Yang, Xiuna, 2016. "Earnings among Nine Ethnic Minorities and the Han Majority in China's Cities," IZA Discussion Papers 10230, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Björn Gustafsson & Xiuna Yang, 2017. "Earnings among nine ethnic minorities and the Han majority in China's cities," Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(3), pages 525-546, July.
    7. Castro Campos, Bente & Ren, Yanjun & Petrick, Martin, 2016. "The impact of education on income inequality between ethnic minorities and Han in China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 253-267.
    8. Han, Enze & Paik, Christopher, 2017. "Ethnic Integration and Development in China," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 31-42.
    9. Asadullah, M. Niaz & Xiao, Saizi, 2020. "The changing pattern of wage returns to education in post-reform China," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 137-148.
    10. Alan Manning & Joanna Swaffield, 2008. "The gender gap in early-career wage growth," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 118(530), pages 983-1024, July.
    11. ZHONG, Hai, 2015. "An over time analysis on the mechanisms behind the education–health gradients in China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 135-149.
    12. Margaret Maurer-Fazio & Sili Wang, 2018. "Does marital status affect how firms interpret job applicants’ un/employment histories?," International Journal of Manpower, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 39(4), pages 567-580, July.
    13. Anthony Howell, 2019. "Ethnic entrepreneurship, initial financing, and business performance in China," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 52(3), pages 697-712, March.
    14. Prema-chandra Athukorala & Zheng Wei, 2015. "Economic Transition and Labour Market Dynamics in China: An Interpretative Survey of the ‘Turning Point’ Debate," Departmental Working Papers 2015-06, The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics.
    15. Dan A. Black & Lars Skipper & Jeffrey A. Smith & Jeffrey Andrew Smith, 2023. "Firm Training," CESifo Working Paper Series 10268, CESifo.
    16. Gustafsson, Björn & Wan, Haiyuan, 2020. "Wage growth and inequality in urban China: 1988–2013," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    17. Qingjie Xia & Lina Song & Shi Li & Simon Appleton, 2014. "The effect of the state sector on wage inequality in urban China: 1988--2007," Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(1), pages 29-45, February.
    18. Prema†chandra Athukorala & Zheng Wei, 2018. "Economic Transition And Labour Market Dynamics In China: An Interpretative Survey Of The €˜Turning Point’ Debate," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(2), pages 420-439, April.
    19. Castro Campos, Bente, 2014. "Official Ethnic Labels and Non-Agricultural Work in Guizhou (China)," Quarterly Journal of International Agriculture, Humboldt-Universitaat zu Berlin, vol. 53(2), pages 1-28, May.
    20. Ding, Sai & Dong, Xiao-Yuan & Maurer-Fazio, Margaret, 2016. "How Do Pre-School and/or School-Age Children Affect Parents' Likelihood of Migration and Off-Farm Work in Rural China's Minority Regions?," IZA Discussion Papers 10073, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:intlab:v:158:y:2019:i:3:p:489-508. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ilounch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.