丰富而廉价的劳动力资源为中国经济的腾飞做出了巨大贡献，也一直被认为是中国发展对外经济的比较优势。近年来，随着经济的快速发展和工资水平的不断提高，“劳工荒”、部分中小企业倒闭、劳动密集型产业的向外转移等现象引起了人们对中国制造业竞争优势的广泛关注与讨论。本文利用劳动力报酬、劳动生产率和单位劳动力成本三个指标，通过与主要竞争国家对比，对中国劳动力竞争优势的现状以及发展趋势进行深入分析。研究发现，2003年以来，中国劳动力报酬大幅度上涨，但是由于部分被劳动生产率的快速提高所弥补，中国单位产出劳动成本的上涨幅度并不大。但是劳动力成本的持续上涨已是大势所趋，中国制造业必须从单纯依靠低劳动力成本获得价格优势转移到新的竞争优势上来。
Abundant and cheap labor forces have made a great contribution to the economic take-off of China，which are considered as comparative advantages over other foreign countries. In recent years，with the rapid economic development and rising wage levels，the phenomena such as the “Labor Shortage”，collapse of small and medium-sized enterprises，and the outflow of the labor-intensive industries have attracted wide attention and discussion on the competitive advantages of Chinese manufacturing. This chapter uses labor remuneration，labor productivity and unit labor cost compared to unit output as three main indicators to analysize the present situation and development trend of competitive advantages of Chinese labor cost by comparing China with other main countries. Through the study finds that greatly increasing of unit labor cost could not be seen in China because the growth of labor productivity offset the quick increasing of the labor remuneration since 2003. However，the increasing of labor remuneration in China is a tendency，Chinese manufacturing must shift from rely heavily on the price advantage derived from low labor cost to a new competitiveness.
