Wages tapped to curb income gap
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-06-27 06:44 China's monopoly industries may be forced to cut
their employees' wages as the government looks at reducing the country's
widening income gap, the Economic Observer said Monday.
The report said the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the
country's top planning body has, in collaboration with other central government
departments, worked out a draft document titled "Pushing forward the reform of
income distribution".
The document calls for the reform of the salary, fiscal, tax and
administrative systems, the report said, quoting Zhang Benbo, a researcher with
the Academy of Macroeconomic Research affiliated to NDRC.
The document is still being discussed by stakeholders, Zhang said, adding
that strong opposition has made it impossible to set a timetable for the
document to become government policy.
High salaries in electricity, telecommunications and other monopoly
industries have drawn strong criticism in China, where the gini coefficient, the
leading measure of inequality, now stands at 0.46, exceeding the
internationally-recognized alarm level of 0.45.
The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
has recently met to discuss the reform of the wage distribution system. The
meeting called for measures to alleviate the widening rich-poor divide.
Bu Zhengfa, deputy minister of Labor and Social Security, has also lashed out
at the high salaries received by workers in the monopoly industries.
At a recent meeting in Beijing, he said the real incomes of people working in
for electricity, telecommunications, finance, insurance, water, tobacco and
other monopoly industries are five to 10 times higher than in other
industries.
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