Results: Evolution of Salary Concentration in Spainin the Period 2006–2014

By way of context, between the years 2006 and 2014 the average salaries in Spain clearly show a growing trend in current terms. The nominal annual

TABLE 2.3

Evolution of Gross Annual Wage and Wage per Hour per Worker in Spain (2006-2014)

Note: Compiled by the authors from INE (2008,2012,2016) microdata.

average wages experienced an increase of 15.8% in the first four years, during years of economic expansion. This rate translated into 16.4% in the entire period due to the stagnation of wages during the economic crisis that affected the subsequent years. In any case, as can be seen in Table 2.3, gender differences in wages are evident. In spite of having lowered the gender wage gap in the whole period, it continued to remain at an alarming 13% in 2014.

But beyond gender differences in terms of average wages, we believe that it is also important to pay attention to the distribution of wages to see if wage distribution as a whole is being apportioned equally or not. In other words, to what extent does wage concentration and its evolution in recent years give cause for concern.

Analyzing the distribution of annual income, which is the regular income workers receive for doing their job, the global Gini index of all workers shows an increase in the concentration of wages in annual terms in the period 2006-2014, having gone from 0.32 to 0.34 in the eight years analyzed (see Table 2.4).

In order to carry out the analysis by gender, the population was divided into female workers and male workers. The wage concentration is seen to be higher every year among women than among male workers, these within- group rates reaching the values of Glw_omen = 0.3491 and GImc» = 0.3208. It can be seen that the evolution experienced by the female Gini index is growing; the wage distribution among women is becoming less equal over the years.

Considering the between-groups index (called the gender Gini index), where only the wage differences between men and women have been taken into account (but not within each group), values higher than the global index are observed in all years and with an increasing trend over the period considered.

If we look at the first breakdown of the Gini index, over the years the percentage part of the total inequality that is attributable to gender differences (gross between-genders index) has been increasing, while the percentage part due to inequalities between people of the same gender (within-gender index) has decreased slightly. As a result, at the end of the period both percentages are around 50%, both in terms of annual salary and salary per hour. If we

TABLE 2.4

Inequality in Wage Distributions in Spain: Annual Wage and Wage per hour (2006-2014)

Note-. Compiled by the authors from INE (2008,2012,2016) microdata.

break down, in turn, the gross between-genders inequality, we can see how the net between-genders index has decreased substantially from 2006 to 2014, observing, consequently, a growth of the proportion due to the transvariation index. This implies that the differences between wages that men earn more than women minus the differences between wages that women earn more than men have declined in the time period considered. The higher is the percentage represented by the net between inequality index, the higher are the differences between salaries between both genders.

For a better understanding of the phenomenon of wage concentration in recent years in Spain and to reach a clearer understanding of the current situation in order make decisions to redress the imbalance, the following sections present an analysis of the company and some of the characteristics of its workers considered used in the analysis.