Cross posted from https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34345715
Original Bloomberg link (paywalled).
One of China’s largest online recruitment platforms has quietly stopped providing wage data it’s compiled for at least a decade, making it more difficult to gauge the health of the world’s biggest labour market just as it comes under strain from US tariffs.
Zhaopin Ltd has yet to publish its reports on average wages companies offered to new hires in 38 key cities for the past two quarters. It’s previously released them regularly within the first month after each quarter ended.
Beijing-based Zhaopin didn’t reply to a request for comment.
The missing numbers extend a pattern in China of data providers discontinuing or pausing statistical releases. Alternative figures on employment have become especially sparse, depriving economists and investors of information about a subject that’s grown more sensitive due to soaring youth unemployment, widespread salary cuts and lay-offs.
Zhaopin’s last report, published in early October, showed a decline in salaries from a year ago in the three months ended September, in a resumption of a downward trend that started in mid-2023. The figures it provided were one of the few independent statistical sets that reflected broad-based wage changes across the country.
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Such alternative data has become increasingly important in assessing China’s employment conditions in recent years. Many economists think the official measurements — including the jobless rate and income statistics — have failed to fully capture the extent of stress on the labour market from the economy’s slowdown.
China Institute for Employment Research, a think tank based in Beijing, stopped making its quarterly labour market reports and indexes publicly available since 2022. China Dissent Monitor, which documented protests including those triggered by labour disputes, suspended its work earlier this year after USAID funding was withdrawn by the Trump administration.
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China’s ability to shield its labour market from the trade war is critical to the prospects of the world’s second-largest economy, which is counting on domestic consumers to offset the fallout from US tariffs of as much as 145%. Weak income growth and household expectations have been a major factor behind sluggish consumption in recent years.
While policymakers have pledged to lift wages, the immediate outlook for employment is actually changing for the worse. As many as 16 million jobs are exposed to China’s exports to the US, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s estimates.
A total of eight million jobs could be lost over the next two years, based on the last time both exports and the property sector contracted in 2015 and 2016, according to Capital Economics Ltd.
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In an effort to better gauge the labour market situation, Capital Economics recently constructed an index based on data including those from purchasing managers’ index surveys and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business’s poll on firms’ labour costs.
While the index largely used to move in sync with the official jobless rate, it’s been painting a much weaker picture since mid-2024.
“Chinese policymakers will probably find ways to keep the published unemployment rate close to their ‘around 5.5%’ target for this year,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics. “But this may mask broader weakness in the labour market,” he said in a Wednesday report.