Does communist party membership bring a wage premium in China? a meta-analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT In China, despite the drastic economic transition from a planned system to a market economy, the influences of the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s organization on firm management in both the public and private sectors are still remarkable. This study performs a meta-analysis to examine the impact of CPC membership on wage levels in China using 622 estimates extracted from 71 English and Chinese papers. The results of meta-synthesis suggest that CPC membership positively affects wage levels. They also reveal that the effect size of CPC membership is greater for state-owned enterprises, urban regions, female workers, and regular wages, as compared with privately owned enterprises, rural regions, male workers, and performance pay. The test results of publication selection bias based on the FAT-PET-PEESE approach indicate that the collected estimates contain genuine evidence of the wage premium of CPC membership, and its true impact takes a value within a range of 0.0414 to 0.0431 in terms of the partial correlation coefficient.