Wages of Construction Workers and Prices of Construction Materials for the 1st Quarter of 2008

To facilitate users in obtaining consolidated statistics on construction costs, the Statistics and Census Service has combined the reports of Wages of Construction Workers and Prices of Construction Materials starting from the first quarter of 2008. In addition, to better reflect the movements of wage rates of construction workers, the wage indices of construction workers have been rebased to the period of the third quarter of 2005 to the second quarter of 2006. In the first quarter of 2008, the average daily wage of the overall construction workers was MOP570, down by 4.2% over the previous quarter. The average daily wage of skilled & semi-skilled workers was MOP605, down by 3.2%, and that of unskilled workers rose by 8.5% to MOP395. Among the skilled & semi-skilled workers, truck drivers had the highest average daily wage of MOP731, up by 2.5% over the previous quarter, which was followed by air-conditioning mechanics, structural iron erectors and fire service mechanics, with MOP699, MOP631 and MOP628 respectively. After discounting the effects of inflation, the rebased real wage index of the overall construction workers for the first quarter of 2008 was 106.7, down by 5.9% from the preceding quarter, of which the wage index of skilled & semi-skilled workers decreased by 7.3% to 106.0 and that of unskilled workers increased by 4.9% to 111.9. In the first quarter of 2008, prices of most of the construction materials registered quarter-to-quarter growth, in which the average price of spiral and round reinforcing steel bars followed the rising trend of 2007, up by 20.3% over the previous quarter to MOP6,266 per tonne; the price of cement increased by 4.5% to MOP630 per tonne, and that of clamping plate (Plywood) stood at MOP63 per square metre, up slightly by 0.5%.