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I found some data on this here: http://www.bls.gov/fls/china.htm http://www.bls.gov/fls/china.htm It has a table of cost per hour of Chinese manufacturing work
by noahl 15y ago
I found some data on this here: http://www.bls.gov/fls/china.htm http://www.bls.gov/fls/china.htm
It has a table of cost per hour of Chinese manufacturing workers from 2002 to 2008. They went from $0.57 (2.1% of US wages) to $1.36 (4.2% of US wages) over that time.
If this is in fact what he's talking about, then wages in China are still incredibly low. Does anyone know what wages in Vietnam or Africa are like?
- Hyena 15y agoThe problem is that a wage-to-wage comparison with their export markets isn't important. China's advantage is stacking low wages + large staff against high wages + machines.
- chugger 15y agoI found this. Why Factories Are Leaving China http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_21/b4179011091633.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_21/b41790110... Fan is expanding his factory in Vietnam, where wages are $100 a month, one-third what he pays in China. $100 a month. that's amazing.
- tsotha 15y agoHow much does it cost to live in Vietnam, though?
- shoham 15y agoRhetorical question, I suppose, but I 'lived' in Vietnam (backpacking) for about a month and spent less than ten dollars a day (significantly more than I would have if I lived there for say a year and cooked my own meals, and had rent instead of staying in guest houses). Probably around $3 a day for a middle class person would suffice, or $4,000 a year for a middle class family of four. Hard to compete with that!
- tsotha 15y agoActually, it was an honest question. Even if the only expense was food, absent government help one person would have a hard time staving off malnutrition on that much money here in the US. That's living under a bridge and wearing trash bags to work. I don't really understand why that's the case, either.
- shoham 15y ago"Even if the only expense was food, absent government help one person would have a hard time staving off malnutrition on that much money here in the US. That's living under a bridge and wearing trash bags to work." Exactly. "I don't really understand why that's the case, either." I'm not sure I understand the question. If you mean, "Why do these other countries cost less to live in?" it is the case that some things cost the same in both 1st world and developing countries. Some of it goes back to Brenton Woods, and some of it goes back further. It's a really good question, but it seems that the more 'developed' a country the higher the wages, AND the higher the cost of living, which in a lot of areas leads to equillbirum, but certainly not in every area. One example would be the family car, which might cost 20K new in the US, and about the same in Vietnam, so only very rich people in Vietnam can afford a new car. One of the reasons the U.S. got out ahead on this industry is because a lot of the inventors in the field were, and have been American, and because of trade deals, and tariffs that used to protect the industry. It's still the case that people want their cars to come more highly trained workers than say their shoes (not life or death if they're junk). And those workers end up costing more to train and keep, thus the high price on this kind of good.
- pnathan 15y agoIn a race to the bottom, we all lose.
- ajross 15y agoNo, that's just wrong. The people at the bottom certainly don't lose. Japan was at the bottom (of industrial economies) in the post war world and leveraged those low wages to re-industrialize and get to the top. China did the same thing in the 80's and 90's, and is now seeing upwards wage pressure as they approach a first-world level of economic activity. Next up will be the Indias and Vietnams of the world. Hopefully eventually subsaharan africa will get there. This is a good thing, overall. Yes, working conditions at "the bottom" are often huge problems (though again: remember the comparison is to abject poverty). And yes, rapid change causes people to lose jobs elsewhere faster than they can be replaced, and that sucks for those people. But to argue that chasing cheap wages is inherently bad is isomorphic to arguing that poor people should always be poor, and that's much less palatable to me.
- tadfisher 15y agoJapan and China also had an advantage over the Industrial Revolution countries in that all of their capital didn't have to be created anew. It took 150 years for the US to get to where Japan got in under 60.
- ippisl 15y agoThe % of US wages doesn't make sense. many manufacturing workers in the US earn minimum wage , which is between $5.15-$8.5 per hour. So the figure should be 15%-20% of US wages.