|
The report released by the UN's International Labor Organization found wage earners on the mainland made an average equivalent of US$656 a month, ranking 57th out of the 72 countries the report covered. In china, average salary for employees in the city was 4,388 yuan a month in 2011.
The average wage of the world
The total value of world income is closing in on $70 trillion per year, and there are seven billion people in the world, so the average income is heading towards $10,000 per person per year. Easy .But not everyone has a job and some of those seven billion are children. So another question you could ask is: "What is the world's average wage?"
That is more tricky to answer, but a group of economists at the United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) has had a go, though they have never gone public with this information. Until now.
Let's consider the scale of the Herculean task the number crunchers at the ILO set themselves.
First, they work out the total wage bill for every country in the world. To do that they get the average salary from each office for national statistics, and multiply that amount by the number of earners in each country.
In this way, they are able to give more weight to countries which have more workers in them. The average salary in China has more influence on the world average than the average salary in New Zealand, where many fewer people live.
Once they have the total wage bill for each country, they add them all together and divide by the total number of earners in the world.
That gives you the answer - the world's average salary is $1,480 a month, which is just less than $18,000 a year.
Purchasing Power Parity dollars
But these dollars are not normal US dollars. The economists use specially adjusted exchange rates - the average salary is calculated in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollars. One PPP dollar is equal to $1 spent in the US.
Essentially, the PPP dollar takes into account the fact that it is cheaper to live in some countries than others. The idea is that we don't care how many actual dollars somebody is paid in, say, China, but we care about what sort of stuff those dollars can buy.
"If someone in China takes their salary of 1,500 yuan per month and they go to the bank, they will actually get $200," ILO economist Patrick Belser explains.
"But this is not what we use to compute this global average, because what is important here is what people are able to buy with these 1,500 yuan, and this is where we compare to the purchasing power of the US dollars and find that it is actually equivalent to around $400."
Another way of putting it is that the conversion to PPP dollars expresses how much it would cost you in the US to get the equivalent goods and services you can buy with your salary locally.
wages are a much more obvious indicator of the quality of life
"It certainly tells you something about the state of worldwide economic development, I would say. We always use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the reference, but I think we also have a whole lot of trouble understanding exactly what is the meaning of GDP, whereas wages are a much more obvious indicator of the quality of life.
"It tells you something about the quality of life of the middle classes. It tells you where most of the people are at the end of the month, and it gives you an idea of how they live - how often they can go out, what they can buy, where they can live, what kinds of rents they can afford. And that's the interesting thing, compared to GDP per capita, which is a much more abstract notion."
And if you understand the limitations of this number - that it gives a rough idea of average employee salaries - Belser says it holds an important lesson.
"What it shows, also, is that the average salary is still pretty low," he says. "And so, that the worldwide level of economic development is in fact still pretty low, in spite of the huge affluence that we see in some places."
Chinese Employers Ready to Give Salary Increases
Over 80 percent of the employers in China expect to increase the salaries of their employees by more than 6 percent this year, standing out from the employers in the region, according to the results of a latest survey.
The 2012 Hays Salary Guide released on Monday showed that the employers in Singapore expect to give their employees an average salary increase of between 3 percent and 6 percent in 2012.
What is your salary’s range
The average wage of the world US$ 1,480
1. Luxembourg US$ 4,089
2. Norway US$ 3,678
3. Austria US$ 3,437
4. United States US$ 3,263
5. Britain US$ 3,065
6. Belgium US$ 3,035
7. Sweden US$ 3,023
8. Ireland US$ 2,997
9. Finland US$ 2,925
10. Korea US$ 2,903
|
|