Indonesia is inaugurating Southeast Asia's first bullet train, a significant component of China's Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.
This project is set to drastically reduce travel time between Jakarta and Bandung from three hours to 40 minutes.
The high-speed rail, named "Whoosh," is of Chinese make and will seamlessly link Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, with Bandung, the densely populated capital of West Java province, reported the Associated Press.
Chinese engineers are cheap, Indonesian workers are cheaper. Chinese workers are cheap too if they used a lot of those.
Chinese engineers in top cities (Beijing, Shanghai, etc.) get paid comparably to the West. An entry-level SDE at Alibaba in Beijing gets offered like 80k USD, which is close to the compensation in Toronto (~110k USD for an entry-level at Amazon), Berlin (~70k for the same position at Amazon), and London (~80k for the same).
Huh. That’s impressive, but I guess poor countries are also often unequal countries. Does that go for civil and mechanical engineers as well?
No idea, that’s not my industry. There’s a reason Chinese people value education so much. It’s a key driver in upwards socioeconomic mobility.
With large construction projects, skilled labor is not as expensive as the land needed.
I’m going to guess land is cheaper in Indonesia too, but I’m not sure.
Why is that? You’d expect that labour requirement would scale with track length just as land requirement does. Or do you just mean the engineers?