Market Opportunities and Challenges

As already mentioned, China’s huge population and low wage rates gave it a significant competitive advantage when economic reforms and trade liberalization first began. This advantage, however, appears to be eroding as wages in China have risen significantly in the last years. For instance, from 2000 to 2020 Chinese average wages grew at an average annual rate of 11.4 percent. As you can see in the given figure, China’s average monthly wages were RMB 7,000 in 2010 compared with $311 for Mexico in the same year (meaning that Chinese wages were 30.2 percent the size of Mexican monthly wages). In 2013, however, Chinese monthly wages averaged $1,000 and were 45.5 percent higher than the Mexican wages, which averaged ...

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