Page 83 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 7

CPS2035 Noor Ismawati et al.

Earning and shares of paid employees in
different industries by citizenship
1
Noor Ismawati Mohd Jaafar , Nor Alkashah Arif Shah , Zaidatul Azreen
2
Zulkiple 2
1 Social Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Malaya
2 Manpower and Social Statistics Division, Department of Statistics Malaysia

Abstract
While studies had shown that non-local workers is giving a positive impact to
the Malaysian productivity, the public raised many concern over varios issues.
One of their worrieness is the employment lost by the local workers. Hence
this paper investigate the distribution of paid employees in various industry
and examine whethere they are differentiable by citizenship status. Based on
Salaries and Wages Survey 2010-2017, the analysis also includes earnings. The
data indicates that majority of the citizen employees worked in manufacturing
sector, construction sector and three industries under other sectors. In
contrast, almost all of the non-citizen works in agriculture sector,
manufacturing sector, construction sector and another 2 industries under
other sectors. The analysis also shows that the proportion of non-citizen
employees were small and their earning is comparatively lower. However in
certain industries, these group of employees earns significantly higher. The
analysis also shows that the gap in proportion of employee and earning in
agriculture was relatively small. It is concluded that distribution of the paid
employee varies by industry and citizenship except in agriculture. The same
conclusion can also be made on earning distributions.

Keywords
Earnings; Primary occupation; Monthly pay; Foreign worker

1. Introduction
The growing number of foreign worker can be seen not only in developed
countries but also in developing countries. The foreign worker can be classify
wether they have had low, medium or high skills (Huber et al., 2010). While the
migrant workers is normally associate with low and medium skill workers, the
expatriates is referred to those with the high skill-high pay-high
education(Howell & Newman, 1959; Mandell, 1958; Thompson, 1959; Wallace,
1959; Schollhammer, 1969; as summarised in McNulty & Brewter, 2017). In
2017, 98.5 percent of the foreign paid employee in the Malaysian work force
were those with low and medium skill. Eventhough the increase of these
workers especially the migrant workers is a public concern in Malaysia, their
existence had shown to give positive productivity effects on the economy
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