Some Recent Topics
The Special Topics on CHIP2013
Income Distribution Books Launch and Professor Zhao Renwei 80th Birthday
The Minimum Wage Project

TOPIC: The Minimum Wage Project

ABSTRACT: "The Minimum Wage Project" was opened by CIID researchers in 2013. In Jan. 18 2014, they held a conference on the interim results. Project members reported their findings on minimum wage policy in China.
KEYWORDS: Minimum Wage
Read times: 25548
DETAILS:

 中国收入分配研究院最低工资课题

Figure 1: The confrence in Jan, 18th, 2014

In January 18, 2014, China Institute for Income Distribution (CIID) held a conference on “The Minimum Wage Project”. The participants included Director Nie of MOHRSS; Hainan Su, the former director of the Institute for Labor and Wage Studies; Shi Li, the executive dean of CIID; Prof. Yang Du from Institute of population and labor economics of CASS, and other project members from Beijing Normal University, Renmin University, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Academy of Macroeconomic Economic, and Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Financial Studies in Switzerland. The topics covered the impacts of minimum wage on profits, the impacts on employment and income distribution among urban workers and migrant workers, gender differences, the implementation of minimum wage policy, and so on. Researchers also introduced the research reports of minimum wage policy in Europe countries such as France, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.

 

2015年6月28日,“中国最低工资政策评估”研讨会在北京会议中心召开。本次会议由北京师范大学中国收入分配研究院、人力资源和社会保障部劳动关系司、劳动工资研究所在北京会议中心共同举办。参会人员包括:北京师范大学中国收入分配研究院“最低工资课题负责人”李实教授、人力资源社会保障部劳动关系司聂生奎司长、人力资源社会保障部劳动工资研究所杨黎明副所长(正司级)、人力资源社会保障部劳动关系司王婧副处长、全国工商联法律部劳动关系处李强副处长、人力资源保障部劳动工资研究所王霞主任、胡宗万副主任、哈尔滨市人社局劳动关系科高延明、苏州市人社局劳动关系科吴传平副科长、长沙市人社局劳动关系科汪晓霞等省市代表,以及“中国收入分配研究员最低工资课题”主要研究成员。  聂生奎司长致辞并对我国最低工资问题进行了系统阐述,从宏观层面介绍了政府部门在最低工资政策上的具体规章制度和执行情况。李实教授综述了北京师范大学中国收入分配研究院最低工资课题组近两年的主要学术成果,并结合我国现实状况逐个剖析。在具体研究成果的交流中,中国社会科学院经济研究所邓曲恒副研究员、国家发改委社会发展研究所万海远博士、北京师范大学经管学院林树明博士、邢春冰教授、中国人民大学经济学院王湘红教授等报告了自己的学术研究成果。人社部胡宗万副主任、贾东岚等根据政府掌握的信息,报告了政府部门对最低工资问题的研究成果。全国工商联王强副处长以及各地人社局代表就最低工资政策在具体执行中的问题进行了交流。  研讨会综合了政府和学术研究者对最低工资问题的不同观点,发挥二者所长,对我国最低工资政策做了深入探讨,推动了最低工资政策的研究。

Figure 2: The confrence in Jun. 26th, 2015

VIEWPOINTS or ARTICLES:
Since China promulgated new minimum wage regulations in 2004, the magnitude and frequency of changes in the minimum wage have been substantial, both over time and across jurisdictions. This paper uses county-level minimum wage panel data and a longitudinal household survey from 16 representative provinces to estimate the employment effects of minimum wage changes in China over the period of 2004 to 2009. In contrast to the mixed results of previous studies using provincial-level data, we present evidence that minimum wage changes have significant adverse effects on employment in the Eastern and Central regions of China, and result in disemployment for females, young adults, and lowskilled workers.
本文运用微观调查数据,研究最低工资政策对工人收入及分配结构的影响。我们首先使用倍差法分析最低工资对工人收入水平的影响,然后应用倍差法和比例法分析最低工资政策对不同类型工人收入增长率的影响,以考察最低工资的收入分配效应。分析结果显示,总体而言最低工资对工人收入不具有显著影响,仅仅对在集体企业中工作的工人具有显著负影响;对于收入水平位于上一期最低工资150%-250%区间内的工人收入,最低工资具有显著负影响,这些显示该政策可能会对收入分配结构产生一定轻微影响。本文的分析结果具有稳健性。
This paper studies the impact of minimum wage policies in China on migrant workers’ income and employment. We use rural household data from 2003-2006 containing information about migrant workers’ wage income and their working days. We employ difference-in-difference (DID) method and the method of average treatment on the treated (ATT) to examine the effects of minimum wage increases in 2004 and 2005. We find that the net wage impact for migrant workers is ositive and the net impact on working days is negative after controlling for individual characteristics and provincial effects. We also examine how different income groups are affected by minimum wage adjustments. We find that minimum wage change rate has positive effect on wage increase for migrant workers whose wages are much lower than the minimum wage level, but has no significant impact on workers in other income levels. Controlling for the minimum wage effects, income inequality within migrant workers have been increased.
With the continuous increasing of minimum wages in China from 474 yuan in 2004 to 1072 yuan in 2011 on average, the impact of MWs on migrant workers' wages needs to be reevaluated. Contrast to other OECD countries, the regulated MWs in China did not specify the legal working hours. Employers may extend the workers' working hours to compensate the increased costs. This paper employs a large migrant household survey and some municipal data to investigate the impact of MWs increasing on migrant workers' wages by considering the working hours. The results show MWs only have small negative impacts on migrants' employment and its impacts on rural female workers are larger than other groups. What is more, only the employment of rural migrant workers with low qualifications will be affected by MWs' increase, but not urban migrants. Without controlling working hours, MWs' increase will improve rural migrants and West migrants' wages. However, MWs' increase intensifies rural male workers' working hours, therefore it has no significant impact on migrant workers' wages after considering working hours and employment effect.
在本文,我们考察了从1993年开始实施的最低工资制度是否对性别工资差距产生影响。实证分析的结果如下:第一,从1995到2007年低于最低工资标准的比例数都是女性高于男性。第二,性别工资差距在最低工资的高标准地区最大,在中等标准地区最小。第三,最低工资标准和Kaitz Index回报率中的男女差异对性别工资差距的影响,大于由于在不同的最低工资标准(或不同的Kaitz Index)地区分布中的男女差异的影响。第四,从长期角度来看,最低工资在制度的实施有助于缩小性别工资差异,而且最低工资制度缩小男女工资差距的作用在低水平工资组表现得更为明显,但是在较短的时期内该效果并不明显。
This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect firm employment in China using a unique county level minimum wage data set matched to disaggregated firm survey data. We investigate both the effect of imposing a minimum wage, and the effect of the policies that tightened enforcement in 2004. We find that the average effect of minimum wage changes is modest and positive, and that there is a detectable effect after enforcement reform. Firms have heterogeneous responses to minimum wage changes which can be accounted for by differences in their wage levels and profit margins: firms with high wages or large profit margin increase employment, while those with low wages or small profit margin downsize. The increase in enforcement of China’s minimum wage in 2004 has since amplified this heterogeneity, which implies that labor regulation may reduce the monopsony rent of firms. Our results provide evidence for the theoretical predictions of the positive minimum wageemployment relationship in a monopolistic labor market.
This paper empirically analyzes the impact of the Chinese minimum wage regulations on the firm decision to invest in physical and human capital. We exploit the geographical and inter-temporal variation of county-level minimum wages in a large panel data set of Chinese firms covering the introduction of the new Chinese minimum wage regulations in 2004. In our basic regressions including all Chinese firms, we find significant negative effects of the minimum wage on human capital investment rates and significant positive effects on fixed capital investment rates. When grouping firms by their ownership structure, we find that all company groups - including state-owned and foreign-owned companies - have reduced their human capital investments, while only Chinese privately owned companies have increased their fixed capital investment rates.
This paper examines the impact of minimum wage policies on employment,income, and working time. Using data from China Health and Nutrition Survey, wefocus on identifying the shocks or minimum wage adjustments using a pre-specifiedmodel. We control for lagged minimum wage standard, individual characteristics,provincial economic and population variables, and provincial and time fixed effects.We find that, relative to average wage level, minimum wage level has been lower overthe years. Minimum wage has barely noticeable effect on employment, some positiveeffect on raising wages, and shortened the working hours for low-income workers. Insummary, we find some beneficial effects of the minimum wage policies.
Using the China Household Income Project survey data, this paper examines the effect of minimum wage regulation on wage growth and wage distribution in China. Moreover, minimum wage's heterogeneous effects on different population groups are also investigated across different industries and ownerships. In general, our evidence empirically supports the view that the minimum wage creates a substitute effect for the low-paid workers, as they experience a small wage growth under the cost of more unemployment. Meanwhile, the wages of workers that slightly higher than the minimum pay before are pushed up by the increase in demand because of the ripple effect, so the wage level for the slightly high-paid workers before grows more than the low-paid groups.
Utilizing the firm-level panel datasets and hand-collected data on county level minimum wage, this paper estimates the effect of minimum wage on firm profitability. As firms may take time to adjust in response to changes in minimum wage, this paper estimates a dynamic panel model with lagged minimum wage. To capture the heterogeneous effect of minimum wage on profitability, this paper further estimates a quantile regression dynamic panel model. Estimation results suggest that the effect of minimum wage in the current year is negative across the whole conditional distribution of profitability and it exhibits an inverted-U shape across conditional quantiles. Instead, the effect of lagged minimum wage is positive at the 5th, 10th, 15th quantiles, negative at the 90th and 95th quantiles, and not significant at other quantiles. Turning to the overall effect of minimum wage, we can find that minimum wage exerts significantly negative effect on profitability at the 5th quantile and quantiles higher than 40th and the absolute value of the effect of minimum wage increases with these quantiles. For other quantiles, the overall effect of minimum wage on profitability is negligible.
The minimum wage has been regarded as an important element of public policy for reducing poverty and inequality. Increasing the minimum wage is supposed to raise earnings for millions of low-wage workers and therefore lower earnings inequality. However, there is no consensus in the existing literature from industrialized countries regarding whether increasing the minimum wage has helped lower earnings inequality. Studying the effect of the minimum wage on the earnings distribution is more complicated in developing countries such as China than in industrialized countries owing to the presence of large informal sectors in urban areas, large pools of surplus labor in rural areas, and difficulties in ensuring compliance with minimum wage legislation. China has recently exhibited rapid economic growth and widening earnings inequality. Since China promulgated new minimum wage regulations in 2004, the magnitude and frequency of changes in the minimum wage have been substantial, both over time and across jurisdictions. The growing importance of research on the relationship between the minimum wage and earnings inequality and its controversial nature have sparked heated debate in China, highlighting the importance of rigorous research to inform evidence-based policy making. We investigate the contribution of the minimum wage to the well-documented rise in earnings inequality in China over the period from 2004 to 2009 by using city-level minimum wage panel data and a representative Chinese household survey, and we find that increasing the minimum wage exerts beneficial effects on the earnings distribution—by reducing the earnings gap between the median and the bottom decile—over the analysis period.
Utilizing various sources of data, this paper describes the evolution of minimum wage system in China and analyzes its enforcement. In 2010, 13% of workers in our sample earn wages below local minimum wages. This result is worse than most of developed countries but better than countries with about the same level of economic development as China. Both descriptive statistics and regression analysis indicate that some focused groups of workers ought to be targeted when implementing the minimum wages, including female and less educated workers. Our analysis further indicates that the effect of compliance in minimum wages is not only determined by the effort to enforcement, but also correlated with the level of minimum wage, economic structure, ownership type, and labor market conditions, etc. Our study also implies that the current minimum wage level in China is in accordance with China’s current stage of economic development, and frequent and large increase of minimum wage should be restrained.
This paper provides evidence on whether the minimum wage (MW) has affected gender wage gaps in urban China. Several major conclusions emerge. First, from 1995 to 2007, the proportion of workers whose wages were below the regional MW level was greater for female workers than for male workers. Second, the results obtained by using the difference-in-differences estimation method show that from a long-term perspective, the MW will help to reduce gender wage differentials and that the effect is more obvious for the low-wage group. However, in the short term, the amelioration effect is not obvious.
China has formulated and implemented the minimum wage policy for over two decades so far, and it is of great practical significance to look back on the formulation and evolution of the policy and assess the implementation effects to further improve the minimum wage policy and makes it fully play its role.
This chapter summarizes the impacts of the minimum wage policy in China on various aspects of the labor market: wages, employment, gender and income inequalities, and regional disparities. In particular, we pay special attention to the 168 million rural-urban migrant workers in China, focusing on the wage and employment impacts they experience as a result of minimum wage policies. Our findings show that since 2004, minimum wages (nominal) in China have substantially increased, with an average of 11 percent per year, leading to positive effects on wages and decreases in gender wage differentials and income inequality. On the other hand, the rising minimum wage has resulted in job losses for young adults, women, and low-skilled workers. For migrant workers, the minimum wage has only small negative impacts on migrants’ employment in the East and Central regions and no effect in the West. In addition, our project finds that employers increase the monthly working hours of migrant workers. This implies that by offsetting the costs of a higher minimum wage by increasing the number of working hours, employers do not see the need to layoff migrant workers.
This document summarizes the findings of minimum wages from many aspects in theeconomics literature and we hope it can provide a good starting point for researchers who areinterested in the minimum wage study in China.
[ 2014/2/15 1:36:56 ]{ struggle12 } 最低工资历年数据(摘自百度百科)
2008最低工资标准调整情况
2008年7月01日:台湾最低工资是1万8台币 4000人民币
2008年7月01日:香港由每月3480元增加至3580元
2008年7月01日:深圳特区内1000元 特区外为900元
2008年4月01日:上海最低工资标准从840元调整到960元
2008年2月20日:广州最低工资标准从780元调整为860元
2008年7月01日:6月30以前,南京的最低工资标准为850元
2008年7月01日:杭州最低工资标准从750元提高到850元
2008年4月01日:天津市最低工资标准调整为820元
2008年7月01日:北京最低工资标准从730元上调至800元
2008年7月01日:大连最低工资标准从730元上调至800元
2008年1月01日:成都全日制最低工资标准为650元/月左右
2008年1月01日:哈尔滨最低工资标准590元上调到650元
2008年1月01日:长春2008年最低工资650元
2008年1月01日...
[Read the whole post and others' reply]
[ 2014/2/15 1:32:46 ]{ struggle12 } 最低工资标准及其相关背景(摘自百度百科)
最低工资标准是指劳动者在法定工作时间或依法签订的劳动合同约定的工作时间内提供了正常劳动的前提下,用人单位依法应支付的最低劳动报酬。最低工资标准一般采取月最低工资标准和小时最低工资标准两种形式,月最低工资标准适用于全日制就业劳动者,小时最低工资标准适用于非全日制就业劳动者。一般包括奖金和一些补贴。最低工资标准每两年至少调整一次。继2012年8月9日,17省上调最低工资标准后,2013年又18省市上调最低工资标准。
2013年全国共有26个省份调整了最低工资标准,月最低工资标准平均增幅18%。截至2013年12月31日,2013年全国共有北京、浙江、河南、贵州、山东、江西、广西、甘肃、宁夏、天津、山西、上海、广东、云南、新疆、四川、江苏、吉林、辽宁、安徽、福建、内蒙古、湖南、海南等26个省(区、市)和深圳市调整了最低工资标准,全国月最低工资标准最高的是上海市,标准为1620元;小时最低工资标准最高的是北京和新疆,均为15.2元。


基本介绍
最低工资保障制度是我国一项劳动和社会保障制度。[1]《最低工资规定》[中华...
[Read the whole post and others' reply]

More discussion
Projects of CCEHD