Who earns minimum wages in Europe - European Trade Union ...

3. Minimum wages in Europe:
empirical results
In the framework of this report it was not possible to study all of the countries
listed in Table 1. This is particularly true for the set of countries with complex
minimum wage systems because the computation of employment effects and
the socio-demographic composition of minimum wage earners requires
collecting information on the array of minimum wages that apply in each of
these countries. We therefore chose to focus on a limited set of countries that
nevertheless a) reflect the international diversity of minimum wage systems,
i.e. contains both types of systems described in the previous section; b) strikes
a geographic balance between the different European sub-regions (Nordic,
Anglo-Saxon, Western-Continental, Southern, Central and Eastern Europe);
and finally c) have a sufficiently large EU-SILC sample to allow for statistical
inference. After consultations with experts from the European Trade Union
Institute in October 2011, we opted to focus in the empirical section of this
report on the following countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary,
Ireland, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Given the absence
of important countries in this sample (France and the Scandinavian countries
could not be treated at this point), we hope to be able to extend this selection
to a wider set of countries in the near future (see also the suggestions for
further research in Section 4). The presentation of the empirical results on
these countries is divided into two parts: Section 3.1 presents qualitative
information on minimum wage systems and documents the diversity of
European countries with respect to the way in which minimum wages are
determined, extended, and differentiated in each of the countries in our
sample. The quantitative results based on the EU-SILC and GSOEP data are
presented in Section 3.2.
3.1 The qualitative dimension: the European diversity
of minimum wage systems
The qualitative data on national minimum wage systems has been handpicked
from the major databases mentioned in Section 2, mainly the ILO
minimum wage database, the country reports published by the European
Industrial Relations Observatory, the database on collective bargaining
agreements by the Belgian Ministry of Employment, and the WSI minimum
wage database. For each of the nine countries in our sample, Table 2 presents
a) the type of minimum wage system; b) the mechanism with which minimum
wages are determined in each country; c) a description of existing extension
mechanism; d) if applicable, a list of categories of workers that are exempted
from the minimum wage; e) a description of the infra-national differentiation
26 Report 124