Rural wages up in 2009
- Source: Global Times
- [03:07 December 28 2009]
- Comments
Two women migrant workers in Sichuan Province examine factory products earlier this month. They got the job after some training. Photo: CFP
By Zou Le
The highest-level meeting to discuss and formulate polices about rural issues in the upcoming year opened Sunday in Beijing.
China's central rural work conference so far revealed that rural residents' income increased by 9.2 percent in the first three quarters of 2009 compared with the same period last year.
"Comparatively speaking, this is a satisfying figure if you take the grim impact of economic downturn into consideration," Du Zhifeng, director of Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), told the Global Times.
According to Du, the return of a large number of migrant workers to their hometowns due to the economic crisis, which led to the shutdown of hundreds of factories and a decrease in the price of some agricultural products, slowed the growth in income among rural residents.
Some counter measures were taken to ease the situation.
Rural income makes up of four categories: household business operation, wages, transfer income (from government subsidies) and property.
A report released by the CASS this April showed that wage income constitutes 38.9 percent of all rural income last year, the majority of which was earned by migrant workers.
As early as the beginning of this year, around 20 million migrant workers had to return home after they were laid-off or had difficulties landing a job in major cities.
"The crisis was really a big blow on these people and the government took counter-measures to battle the problem. For instance, free training was provided to those returned and preferential policies were also given to them to start their own business and some regional governments subsidized those enterprises as to avoid the layoff," Du says.
The State Statistics Bureau said that by the end of the third quarter of 2009, cross-region employment among migrant workers reached 151.98 million, 11.57 million more than the same period last year.
"Increasing the income of more than 800 million rural people is core to the government's plan to boost the domestic consumption with the help of rural economy, but many other improvements like healthcare and infrastructure have to be carried out in the meantime," Du added.
