Social Justice: Disparities in Average Earnings across Portuguese Municipalities

Martinho Martinho

doi:10.3390/socsci8040125

Abstract

An ever-ongoing discussion these days involves the disparities in monthly earnings across different genders, geographical locations, levels of education, economic sectors, and skills and careers, with various economic and social consequences. In fact, in a framework such as that in which we live in nowadays (with pertinent concerns about economic and social convergences across several indicators), investigating these disparities would be interesting in order to complement the basis that is considered for the design of social policies. There are few studies considering the approaches here developed for this topic. The objective of this study is to analyse the disparities in the average monthly earnings received by employees across Portuguese mainland municipalities over the period 2004–2012, considering as additional analysis criteria geographical location, gender, levels of qualification, levels of education, economic sectors, professional activities, and further qualifications. For this both a cluster and factor analysis were considered to better identify municipalities with similar characteristics and correlations among variables. The results show that the disparities in the monthly average earnings between the Portuguese municipalities are related to three indexes associated with gender, qualifications, and chosen professions. The findings presented are specific to the Portuguese framework; however, the approaches developed in this study may be applied in other contexts to explore the dynamics related with the topic of social justice.

Highlights

The laws and rules for labour markets are, in western countries, often defined by social agreements between the employees labour union confederations and employers’ confederations or other representative structures. In these negotiations a desired objective, among others, is to find a balanced agreement between the labour union’s intentions of increasing wages and improving employees’ rights and the will of the employers in maintaining salaries and increasing their flexibility in the labour markets. Another aspect is regarding the disparities in the wages paid with respect to gender, geographical location, level of education, and qualifications, and the economic sector where the employees develop their activities
Identification of Indexes Related with the Disparities in the Monthly Average Earnings qualified professions, gender with qualifications at the higher education level, gender with
With this study the intention was to analyse the disparities in the monthly average earnings for mainland where the disparities are inferior for the less qualified gender index

Summary

Introduction

The laws and rules for labour markets are, in western countries, often defined by social agreements between the employees labour union confederations and employers’ confederations or other representative structures. In these negotiations a desired objective, among others, is to find a balanced agreement between the labour union’s intentions of increasing wages and improving employees’ rights and the will of the employers in maintaining salaries and increasing their flexibility in the labour markets In this social concertation, another aspect is regarding the disparities in the wages paid with respect to gender, geographical location, level of education, and qualifications, and the economic sector where the employees develop their activities. For the Portuguese context, it is urgent to find adjusted solutions for these social problems, namely to improve the levels of social justice and to promote a balanced development between the north and south and, between the coastal regions and the interior (where the asymmetries are a concern) This approach of factor-cluster analysis was considered to understand the relationships between the several variables (related with the disparities in average monthly earnings) in the explanations of several factors (indexes) and to obtain uncorrelated variables for cluster analysis, avoiding problems of multicollinearity. The work was developed for the Portuguese context, but may be applied to other frameworks

Literature Review

Data Analysis

Monthly

Findings

Cluster Analysis with the Indexes Found through Factor Analysis