How Do Minimum Wage Policies Affect Workers in Emerging Markets?
Albert Park (albertpark@ust.hk)
No 2015-07, HKUST IEMS Thought Leadership Brief Series from HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies
Abstract:
Prof. Albert Park, Director of HKUST IEMS, Chair Professor at HKUST's Division of Social Science, and Professor at HKUST's Department of Economics, reviews the efficacy of minimum wage policies across BRICS countries, i.e. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, highlighting their success or lackthereof as related to critical factors such as labor market coverage, policy enforcement, minimum wage level as compared to mean wages, and others. Prof. Park notes that while minimum wage policies in BRICS countries generally increase wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution, their impact on employment and wealth inequality is less defined. The impact of such minimum wage policies closely tied to the levels of policy compliance and enforcement in each country. For example, in China, India, and South Africa, where enforcement is relatively high, minimum wages have had marked positive effects on labor markets, serving as a sort of "lighthouse effect"), while in Russia and Brazil such regulations may have increased employment in informal labor markets.
Keywords: minimum wage policy; emerging markets; China; Russia; South Africa; Brazil; India; BRICS; minimum wage enforcement; minimum wage compliance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J31 J41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 4 pages
Date: 2015-04, Revised 2015-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-iue and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://iems.ust.hk/assets/publications/thought-le ... f_issue7_v05-web.pdf First version, 2015 (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hku:briefs:201507
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in HKUST IEMS Thought Leadership Brief Series from HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carla Chan (carlachan@ust.hk this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).