Who stole my salary
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Hsieh, Tsung-Yu
Abstract
In recent years, 22K (twenty-two thousand NT dollars) college graduates salary prevailing in Taiwan worries the public and leads us to be curious about who stole their salaries. This thesis aims to investigate this issue based on data from ""Family Income and Expenditure Survey"" conducted by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, between 1982 and 2011. Empirically, various forms of wages are calculated and used as the dependent variable, including wages’ growth rate, the deviation of the growth rates, the increment of wage index, and the deviation of the increment. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth rate, inflation rate, and dummy variables stand for occupations are used as explanatory variables. In order to examine which parts of GDP are more influential, we also decompose GDP into consumption, investment, government spending and net exports as explanatory variables, and applies the causality test to the results. A structural change obviously existed over the period in our study was verified by Chow Test and added to the regressions. Trade dependency ratio was used to stand for globalization, which is widely recognized as a key factor of increasing income inequality worldwide, to test its influence on wages in Taiwan. Finally, LLC Test and IPS Test were applied to our Panel Data and found them are all stationary. Empirical results show that the year of 1995 transferred Taiwan from high-speed gross to low ones. Occupational wage gaps in Taiwan were mainly accumulated during the high-speed gross period while government spending depressed wages’ gross as well as wage gap. The government spending went into opposite effects in the low-speed gross period, but investment play a role to improve wages without broadening wage inequality. To one’s surprise, globalization has slowed down the increment of wage gap between managers and general workers own during the low-speed growth period, and even converge the wage gap between professionals and general workers. The facts that wages stagnated and wage gap narrowed but GDP grew drive us to speculate that capital share booming is the key factor of the phenomenon of 22K college graduate salary. Based on our empirical study, to resolve Taiwan’s wage issue, government policies should stimulate investment, especially in knowledge-intensive industries, in order to increase the demand for professionals which, with some necessary system reform, will increase professional salaries as well as wages in general.
Subjects
wage differentials
income inequality
structural change
globalization
Economic thought
SDGs
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-104-P01323023-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):2c1f202eb32e493bb8b96b654c76c615