Sectoral wage share and its decomposition in China

Tanadej Vechsuruck

International Review of Applied Economics, 2023, vol. 37, issue 1, 50-75

Abstract: This paper investigates sectoral contributions to the trend of national wage share, or the labor income share, during 2000–2014 in China. I apply the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) decomposition, the method widely used in energy studies, to decompose the trend of the wage share. At a sectoral level, with rapid structural transformation, structural change negatively impacted the wage share through the between-sector effect – the structural and price effects – mainly from agriculture. This result confirms Arthur Lewis’s hypothesis that structural transformation has a negative contribution to the wage share. At a national level, when the wage share declined before 2008, the between-sector effect was as significant as the within-sector effect – the wage and productivity effects. After 2008, the within-sector effect directed the increasing wage share trend. This implies that although structural transformation matters to the wage share in a large developing country like China, a wage-productivity nexus has been more influential and determined the increasing trend of the wage share since 2008.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/02692171.2022.2117281

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