Gloria Moreno

Pay Determination in the Spanish Public Sector

In 1977 the Spanish unemployment rate was below 5 per cent, public employment was less than 10 per cent of national employment, and the compensation of public sector employees, public consumption and total public expenditure amounted to 7.3, 10 and 25 per cent of GDP, respectively. At that time, the Spanish public sector was not only under-developed, but also heavily centralised, and the criteria for the selection and the promotion of public sector employees were mostly political rather than economic. The unemployment rate is now about 20 per cent, public employment is roughly 18 per cent of aggregate employment and the compensation of public sector employees, public consumption, and total public expenditure are roughly 11.6, 16 and 45 per cent of GDP, respectively. In 20 years, Spain has thus developed a public sector of similar size to that of the average European country. The Spanish public sector has also changed in other respects: it is more and more decentralised and human resource management relies more on economic than on political criteria, although there is much to be improved in this field.1

The Effects of Gender Differences in Career Interruptions on the Gender Wage Gap in Spain

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to measure the influence of past employment interruptions on current wages and to analyze how these interruptions contribute to the gender wage gap. The discontinuity in labor trajectories of Spanish employees from 2005 to 2010 is examined by measuring the duration of unemployment periods from employees’ first Social Security affiliation to the last job at which they were employed. Through the use of the database “Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales” (MCVL), the estimated gender wage gap is found to be 13.1 percent. Introducing an index of interruptions as an explanatory variable, the results show that interruptions have a negative impact on both mens and womens wages. These interruptions explain 7.4 percent of the daily gender wage gap in Spain, primarily because women experience more interruptions in employment than men.

Youth Employment in Spain: Flows In and Out During the Great Recession and Employment Stability

Recent labour market reforms have tried to smooth the extremely rough situation of young people in the Spanish labour market. Most of these measures have been focused on the promotion of stable youth employment. The aim of this paper is to assess whether the path into permanent employment has been improved as well as the stability of jobs in the case of young people under 30 years old. The reference period is 2005–2015, and the database is the Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales (MCVL) from Social Security. The budgetary efforts to encourage open-ended recruitment have not been enough to increase, the weight of open-ended contracts. Moreover, as other studies on these issues, using probabilistic and duration analysis, the results show that incentives for permanent contracts in the case of young people have not contributed to improve neither the probability to access into a permanent employment nor their level of stability.