Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/52086 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5880
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Industry mean wages in China have exhibited sharply increased dispersion since the early 1990s. The upward trend in differences of average wages among major industry groups parallels increases in wage and income inequality not only between rural and urban sectors but within the urban economy as well. Research on the trend has focused on (1) how market forces have led to a better match between worker pay and worker skills; on (2a) how the growing share of employment in the private sector has caused growing wage inequality; and (2b) how residual government control in a few industrial sectors has contributed to wage inequality due monopoly rent sharing. We show that the industrial wage dispersion in China has evolved to match long-recognized international patterns of industrial wage dispersion and that an increasing proportion of industrial wage dispersion can be explained as returns to observed worker characteristics.
Subjects: 
industry-wage structure
inequality
China
JEL: 
J31
D22
D33
L16
O53
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
308.63 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.