It's highest minimum wage is in Shenzehn at $1.30/hr (40 hr week basis on $207/mo).

It's highest hourly wage is in Beijing at $2/hr. (source)

 

Those are the upper ends of labor wages.  The highest hourly wage is nearly 50% greater than the highest minimum wage.  If this were the case in the US, then  $10/hr average minimum wage equates to a maximum wage of $14.60... or roughly $15/hr.

 

I assume this is unskilled labor, but the article doesn't specify.

 

In Guangdong minimum hourly wage increased to $1.13/hr, while monthly minimum wage (on 40 hr week basis) increased to $1.03/hr, whereas it was increased to $1.21 /hr in Shanghia. (source)

 

So let's say the average hourly wage is above the minimum by ~50%... and assume the average minimum is on the order of $1.20, then the average wage in china is $1.80/hr.

 

The average wage in the US was recently stated to be on the order of $19/hr, so China's labor wage advantage over the US's is on the order of 10x... meaning the same good produced there costs 1/10th what it costs to produce here.  Add some transportation and distribution costs, and it might be on the order of 1/9 or 1/8th net.

 

Parenthetically, I was in China when my eomployer started mfg'ing there... at that time, fully burdened hourly wage in China for my employer's high tech production goods were $0.25/hr -- this included all health care services, full room & board, clothing allowances (factor attire), and Chinese taxes & fees,  and actual take-home pay. So nominal wage appreciation has occurred over the last 20 years at the approximate annual compound rate of  8.1%/year.   The domestic hourly wage (fully burdened --- vacation, health care, etc) for the same technology goods were on the order of $25/hr at that time.  Infrastructure building and outfitting costs in China at that time (Shenzehn) were a small fraction of similar expansion costs here (so low that they didn't even figure into the costs of transferring production to China), not to mention that the rate of construction and final production ready facilities were done in 8 months from raw rural acreage to facilities with parking,  roads, housing, small business's, etc. immediately adjacent.  I watched a large steel beam & reinforced concrete building going up next door to my hotel that built 5 or 6 new floors in 4 days... work progressed 24/7.. .. the place swarmed with construction equipment and personnel day and night with no let-up.   

 

Anyway, recent articles on wages in china indicate that wages in other far eastern countries on the emerging market end are 1/4 those in China and that much of the lower end production by foreign nationals are now producing and expanding in those countries.  

 

It's going to be a long, long time before lower wage & infrastructure cost regions are no longer available to take labor and capital from the OECD's business's.

 

The question is whether there is anything that will stop the increasing trend? Short of some natural disaster that reduces these regions to near permanently uninhabitable, or a geo/political environment that precludes it for some near permanent period of time, I can't see how or why the increasing trend will slow down (much less to a crawl or cease) . As long as capital flow is pretty much open, and without any significant economic restriction, then it behooves domestic business in the aggregate to put as much labor into these regions as it can and move as much capital to develop labor & production as it can muster.

 

Though you hear stories more recently of US domestic business finding incentives to now move some foreign national production back to the US, these are exceptions to the rule of maximizing profits... & are not wide-spread.