labor - What does an engineer cost?

I have been explaining to people once again a bit about one of my pet-projects, the wage indicator. It is an online tool that makes is possible to collect wage information in 17 different countries, and later this year including China and Japan. In some countries, like in the Netherlands were the system is being developed, but also Spain and Germany the system is already producing a wealth of information.
When we have the system in place we can - for example - compare the wages of IT-engineers in the major economies in the world. For each occupation you need about 50 questionnaires before you can make valid assumptions. In China we probably need a few more, since there are so many internal differences in China that have to be covered too.
Perhaps I'm too enthusiastic, since you need a decent infrastructure in place. First, we need to have our online questionnaire up and running. Then, we need to convince employees to fill them in. In most countries that is not really a problem, but that needs a rather good publicity campaign. In the Netherlands the wage indicator is a household name that is used by one third of the labor force! It might take a while before we get to that level in China.