?:abstract
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This paper aims to provide a comprehensive, evidence-based, and up-to-date
assessment of minimum wages in a range of European countries. A first step
towards a better understanding of where Europe stands today on this issue
requires to grasp the diversity of European minimum wage systems, a key
objective of the paper at hand. The second objective is to document international
differences in the so-called "bite" of the minimum wage. This leads to questions
such as "how do national minimum wages compare to the overall wage
distribution?" and "how many people earn minimum wages in each country?"
that are assessed for a set of nine countries from Western, Central and Eastern
Europe: Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Romania, Spain,
and the United Kingdom. This sample was designed to include countries for which
recent evidence has been missing prior to this paper. What is more, the study
also overcomes the narrow focus of extant overviews that have typically focussed
only on full-time employment. Crucially, the study improves on existing work by
looking beyond aggregate numbers; it provides a detailed panorama of the
population of minimum wage earners in each country under investigation,
notably by describing their composition in terms of a range of socio-demographic
characteristics.
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