关键词: 工资水平, 人工成本, 劳动力市场, 人力资本

Abstract: Comparing to the popular studies on the advantage of low labor cost, there is very little empirical research on the economical impact of raising salary from enterprise's perspective. This article studies the cost impact on enterprises by breaking down the salary impact to three components: direct price effect, employment scale effect and structural adjustment effect. The impact on various prorogation paths is estimated using the manufacturing industry's data collected from the third economic census in ZheJiang province. It finds that: the direct cost effect is significant and universal, as salary is the price of labor. However, the current salary level has a limited impact on employment scale. The human capital accumulated is a significant factor in enterprises' structural adjustment with seeking help from capital and technology to relief the pressure of increasing labor cost. With the unavoidable trend of increasing salary level, the government should emphasize on labor investment to improve labor supply, and reinforce the supervision on labor market to increase the labor's efficiency.

Key words: Salary level, Labor cost, Labor market, Human capital