Wages in and out of the public sector: new insights for six selected European countries

Abstract

This paper aims to draw a comparative picture of some basic features of the public sector labour market in six European economies (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom 1 This paper summarized the main results of the thesis for SESS (Socio-Economic and Statistical Studies) P.h.D., Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy. We are very thankful to Prof. Sergio Destefanis for having supported our project, to Prof. Rosa Nonell for having given us the opportunity to visit the Department of Economic Policy and World Economic Structure of the Universitat de Barcelona and to all the participants of the SESS P.h.D. network for the useful comments. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Prof. Raul Ramos for his observations and precious comments on the methodology adopted. We wish to acknowledge the support from Dr. Stefania Cardinaleschi, coordinator of the Structure of Earnings Survey at ISTAT, for the useful information on the Italian part of the Survey. Finally, we would like to thank two anonymous referees for their very useful comments and suggestions. However, we will use some of their suggestions to refine the research in future works.