An Almost Ideal Wage Database Harmonizing the ILO October Inquiry

Daniela Harsch and Joern Kleinert ()

No 71, IAW Discussion Papers from Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW)

Abstract: The lack of comprehensive, international comparable wage data has been deplored for decades and has constrained the empirical analysis of wage growth and inequality. This is the case although, since 1924, the International Labor Organization (ILO) has conducted an October Inquiry to obtain data on wages worldwide, which leads to an annual wage survey containing data for 161 occupations in over 130 countries. Freeman and Oostendorp (2000) have started a novel project to make use of the October Inquiry, which we update. We provide a documentation about the several steps taken to transfer the data into a comparable and usable form. The data allow analyzing wage growth and inequality in a comprehensive way. In this paper, we describe the way we converted the data and present some results on developments in the wage structure between and within countries and occupations.

Keywords: wage growth; cross section models; wage structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 E24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2011-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaw.edu/RePEc/iaw/pdf/iaw_dp_71.pdf (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:iaw:iawdip:71

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAW Discussion Papers from Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rolf Kleimann ().