He Bank of Spainprepared an analysis that includes the important elements salary differences between the public and private sectors. Concretely, in Spain, a public sector employee earns 24% more than an employee of a private company.
This is a margin that is by far the highest among those analyzed by the entity governed by José Luis Escriva. In fact, on average, public wages in the euro zone are only 8% higher than private.
This is indicated by data from the Bank of Spain, which analyzes the most recent available and consolidated economic information, from 2018 to 2021.
The difference in the Spanish case is very notable and It increases even more if it concerns workers who only have basic training or who do not even have a school diploma. In these cases, the difference in salary between the public and the private sector amounts to 29%.
In ItalyGenerally speaking, the difference between public and private salaries is 19% in favor of workers in administrations and their entities. In contrast, countries that participated in the European Commission’s rescue programs such as Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus maintain a wage gap of 10%.
Although these salary differences are considerable, the truth is that they are, in general, lower than before the financial crisis in the euro area. In 2008, in the case of Spain, it was two points higher and was around 26%.
On the other hand, over the period 2010 to 2014 (in the midst of the crisis), this gap was lower than the current one, and was about 22%.
In its conclusions, the analysis of the Bank of Spain admits that the last crisis “It affected many countries” and that austerity measures have notably contributed “to an immediate partial correction of positive wage gaps between the public and private sectors, in particular in countries subject to EU financial aid programs”.
What the authors of this report (Víctor Caballero, Corinna Ghirelli, Ángel Luis Gómez and Javier J. Pérez) are asking is whether these corrections were permanent or whether they ended up being temporary and were reversed in subsequent years .
In this sense, the study indicates that there has only been a partial recovery of the wage gap in favor of the public sector which existed before the financial crisis.
