Brian Nolan, Ive Marx and Wiemer Salverda
one country the figures may refer to annual earnings of full-time employees who worked all year, while for another
they may refer to weekly or even hourly earnings of those in work at the survey date. Thus the dataset effectively
spans the entire range indicated in Table 2 (intriguingly, for neighbouring countries: Danish earnings being hourly
based for all employees and Swedish earnings referring to full-time full-year annual earnings). The potential for
these technical or measurement differences to mislead as to the actual comparative situation of different countries
is significant.
Within the EU significant efforts have been made to produce harmonized data for the analysis of earnings,
in particular via the European Structure of Earnings Survey (ESES) which gathers earnings data in a harmonized
manner from employers. The ESES has particular advantages for the analysis of the relationship between earnings
and firm/sectoral level characteristics. However, the ESES does not necessarily cover all economic sectors, and
firms with fewer than 10 employees are excluded from the scope of the survey. This may have very serious effects
for the coverage of a survey as illustrated for the ESES of the mid-1990s in Table 3 for each of the three restric-
tions: industry coverage (C-K sample), minimum number of employees, and minimum number of weekly hours
worked. In measuring earnings, hourly, monthly and annual earnings can be constructed but hourly earnings are
generally given the most prominence, and gross earnings may be defined to include or exclude overtime pay, shift
premia and bonuses.
Table 3 Coverage of the economy in different samples, 1995/96
(Percentages of the respective dependent labour force, persons)
|
TOTAL ECONOMY FULL MICRO SURVEY |
All |
sectors C-K |
≥10 employees*, | |
|
C-K SAMPLE |
MICRO SAMPLE ESES |
COMPARISON SAMPLE | ||
|
France |
1OO |
71 |
58 |
57 |
|
Germany |
100 |
68 |
64 |
62 |
|
Netherlands** |
100 |
67 (70) |
55 (57) |
48 (56) |
|
United Kingdom |
100 |
66 |
53 |
51 |
* More than 4 employees for Germany.
** full-time equivalents between brackets
Source: Salverda, Nolan et al. 2001, Table 35.
The restrictions in sectoral and size coverage in the ESES mean that is important to complement it by analysis
of data from household surveys, notably in a comparative context from the ECHP and the EU-SILC framework.
The ECHP sought details of normal gross monthly earnings from one’s main job, including normal overtime, to-
gether with hours worked (although some countries had only data on net earnings). This allows both weekly and
hourly earnings to be analysed - see for example Salverda, Nolan et al., (2001), European Commission (2004),
Lohman and Marx (2008) and Lohman (2008).
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