Real wage growth was somewhat below average in July at 5.2%. However, real wage growth was still relatively high at 7.2% in the January-July period, as inflation remained low at 3.7% in the first seven months while net wages increased 11.2%.
In July, wages in the public sector rose by more than two percentage points faster than private sector salaries. In the first seven months, the difference was much wider due to an extra month's worth of salaries handed out to public employees at the beginning of the year - excluding this and other bonus or one-off payments, wages rose 7.2% in the business and 7.7% in the budgetary sector in January-July.
In a breakdown by industry, wages in the first seven months increased most in the booming construction material (+11.3%), finance (+9.9%) and transport and telecom (+8.3%) sectors. At the same time, wage growth was lowest in two sectors - food and beverages (+3.3%) and mining (+2.4%) - that saw their output decline significantly in the period according to recent KSH data.
NAPI Online