Gender Pay Gap in Poland

Michal Grajek

Economic Change and Restructuring, 2003, vol. 36, issue 1, 23-44

Abstract: In this paper we examine the gender pay gap in Poland over 1987–1996, i.e., shortly before and during the transition to market economy. The principle source of data used throughout the paper is the Household Budget Survey conducted by the Polish Central Statistical Office. The study documents three major results. First, the transition to market economy in Poland favored women substantially in terms of relative earnings differentials. The gender pay gap decreased by 10.2 log% points and the position of mean female in male wage distribution went up by 9.9 percentiles over 1987–1996. By 1995, the values of these measures reached the level observed in industrial economies such as the U.K., Austria, Italy or Australia. Second, rising relative skills of women and rising returns to skills explain about half of the fall in the gender pay gap over 1987–1996. Third, the pay gap did not follow a smooth adjustment process. 1989, the year of the first democratic parliamentary elections, which resulted in forming the first non-communist government, saw the most spectacular change, although actual market reforms began one year after. The changes in the early phase of the transition were mostly driven by sudden shifts in relative wages and employment across industries. Afterwards, the pay gap measures stabilized, partly because rising overall wage inequalities offset the advantages of females due to observed skills. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003

Keywords: decomposition; earnings differentials; gender; planned economy; Poland; transition economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/B:ECOP.0000005729.71467.38 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:ecopln:v:36:y:2003:i:1:p:23-44

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/10644/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/B:ECOP.0000005729.71467.38

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Change and Restructuring is currently edited by George Hondroyiannis

More articles in Economic Change and Restructuring from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().