EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

EARNINGS DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CHINESE AND INDIAN WAGE EARNERS, 1987–2004

Olivier Bargain, Sumon Bhaumik, Manisha Chakrabarty () and Zhong Zhao

Review of Income and Wealth, 2009, vol. 55, issue s1, 562-587

Abstract: This paper is one of the first comprehensive attempts to compare earnings in urban China and India over the recent period. While both economies have grown considerably, we illustrate significant cross‐country differences in wage growth since the late 1980s. For this purpose, we make use of comparable datasets, estimate Mincer equations and perform Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions at the mean and at different points of the wage distribution. The initial wage differential in favor of Indian workers, observed in the middle and upper part of the distribution, partly disappears over time. While the 1980s Indian premium is mainly due to higher returns to education and experience, a combination of price and endowment effects explains why Chinese wages have caught up, especially since the mid‐1990s. The price effect is only partly explained by the observed convergence in returns to education; the endowment effect is driven by faster increase in education levels in China and significantly accentuates the reversal of the wage gap in favor of this country for the first half of the wage distribution.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4991.2009.00331.x

Related works:
Working Paper: Earnings Differences between Chinese and Indian Wage Earners, 1987–2004 (2008) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:revinw:v:55:y:2009:i:s1:p:562-587

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0034-6586

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Income and Wealth is currently edited by Conchita D'Ambrosio and Robert J. Hill

More articles in Review of Income and Wealth from International Association for Research in Income and Wealth Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-01
Handle: RePEc:bla:revinw:v:55:y:2009:i:s1:p:562-587