期刊名称：Discussion Papers in Economics / Department of Economics, Royal Holloway
出版年度：2003
卷号：2003
出版社：University of London
摘要：Many countries in the developing world, those undergoing transition from planned to market systems
and even those in the industrialised west, experience periods in which a substantial proportion of the
workforce suffer wage arrears. We examine the implications for estimates of wage relativities and
inequality when countries experience wage arrears on a substantial scale, using the Russian labour
market as a test case. The increase in wage inequality in Russia during transition process far exceeds the
increase in wage dispersion observed in other European countries undergoing transition. Russia also had
much the largest incidence of wage arrears. Given data on wages and the incidence of wage arrears we
construct counterfactual wage distributions, which give the distribution of pay in the absence of arrears.
The results suggest that measures of earnings dispersion that ignore the presence of wage arrears
would, in the Russian case, be some 30 per cent lower in the absence of arrears. If individuals in arrears
are distributed uniformly across the underlying wage distribution, as appears to be the case in Russia,
then it may be feasible to use wage information on the subset of those not in arrears and still get close to
the underlying population parameters
