Job statistics don't capture economy

Yang Zhiming, vice minister of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, recently said at a press conference on the sidelines of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) that the flagging domestic economy is starting to raise unemployment rates.

It's normal to see a sluggish economy weigh on jobless statistics. When the economy slows, investment in businesses will fall and companies will not be ready to accommodate the expanding labor market. And if a business slows down too much, of course, it may have to trim its payroll.

But in China though, it is still too early to say definitively whether weakness in the economy is really behind some of labor shake-ups the country has witnessed over the past year.

If anything, the drop-off in factory hires may just be a sign that fewer people from China's interior regions are willing to leave their hometowns to take up manufacturing jobs along the coast.

The author is Peng Wensheng, economist with China International Capital Corporation.

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