India has highest pay raises in Asia

InformationWeek quotes a Hewitt Associates study that indicates that high-tech jobs have led to Asia's highest pay hikes -- average raise of 14% -- in India.

Companies in the Philippines came in second to India, registering average pay increases from 7.1 percent to 8.6 percent. In South Korea, pay hikes ranged from 7 percent to 7.3 percent, while in China, employees saw salaries jump from 6.7 percent to 7.3 percent.

While India ranked highest in salary increases, it still remains one of the lowest-paying countries in Asia. A 14 percent pay raise for a systems engineer for an Indian company in Bangalore, where such jobs earn $24,000 per year, will pull in roughly as much cash as a 5 percent raise for an employee in Tokyo earning $64,000 doing the same job.

The study measured actual and projected salary increases across five job categories: senior management, manager, professional/technical/supervisory, clerical and support, and manual workers. It included 991 companies in 11 countries surveyed between July and September 2003.

In Singapore, a more developed economy, the average salary increase for 2003 ranged from 2.1 percent to 2.4 percent. Hong Kong and Japan, Asia's most mature markets, had workers with pay jumps of 1.3 percent to 1.5 percent and 1.6 percent to 2.1 percent, respectively. The other countries surveyed--Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Australia--averaged increases of 3 percent to 5 percent.