Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in China

摘要

The goals of this report are to assess the quality and usability of available statistics on Chinas manufacturing employment and labor compensation for the most recent available year and for the period since 1990 and, if possible, to estimate annual, monthly, and hourly labor compensation for PRC manufacturing employees. The report shows that China has released just enough relevant data on annual average wages and labor-related employer expenditures to derive 2002 estimates of annual labor compensation for 30 million city manufacturing employees and 71 million non-city manufacturing employees, that is, those working in village and town enterprises. Combining the published and adjusted labor compensation figures for these two groups results in an approximation of average PRC 2002 labor compensation per manufacturing employee. Because China has not systematically collected and reported adequate data on actual hours worked by manufacturing employees in 2002, or for any full year, this report uses published partial information and a set of hypotheses to estimate annual hours worked by city and non-city manufacturing employees, thus calculating rough approximations of average 2002 hourly labor compensation in manufacturing for these two categories of manufacturing employees and for China as a whole. Labor compensation estimates are converted into U.S. dollars at the commercial exchange rate, and also estimated in international purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars to give a sense of the real purchasing power of the compensation of PRC manufacturing employees in their own domestic economy.