When Does Transition Increase the Gender Wage Gap? An Application to Belarus

Francesco Pastore and Alina Verashchagina ()

No 2796, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper suggests an analytical framework to analyse the joint evolution of female participation and wages across countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Former Soviet Union (FSU), of which Belarus is a particular case. In CEE, female participation has reduced relatively more than wages, due to greater wage rigidity; in the FSU, wages have reduced more than participation, due to labour hoarding practices. In Belarus, only wages adjust, since (mainly state owned) firms tend to largely maintain their entire workforce. Underneath slow transition and remarkably stable female participation rates (at over 80%), the unconditional gender gap in log hourly wages has increased by a half, while that in log of net and total monthly wages has more than doubled over almost a decade (1996-2004). The Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991) decomposition suggests that the deterioration of women wages is caused by negative changes in observed characteristics (due to horizontal segregation) and in the remuneration for those characteristics. Instead, very bland changes in the residual wage distribution tended to reduce (not to increase) the gender wage gap: in fact, women have benefited both of changes in the degree of wage inequality and of gains in the mean female rank in the male residual distribution.

Keywords: economic transition; evolution of the gender wage gap; decomposition analysis; wage inequality; Belarus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J22 J31 P20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2007-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-lab and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published - published in: Economics of Transition, 2011, 19 (2), 333-369

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