ABSTRACT
The chapter investigates public views on deciding how much people ought to earn, based on seven items taken from the 1992 and the 1999 ISSP Inequality module asking about what people think of the possible factors for determining salaries. The analysis is carried out on the pooled data of the two surveys. The former communist societies and the market economies are divided into welfare-regime groups based on the available national cases at the two points in time.
Principal component analysis reveals three separate factors (social needs, achievement, performance) of legitimating payments. It is assumed that the necessity of supporting family gets a larger role in the former communist countries in comparison to market economies. In contrast, responsibility, education and supervision are viewed as stronger determinants of earnings in the market economies, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Achievement and performance are expected to become more important factors in the post-communist countries by 1999 in comparison to 1992, while social needs can still remain persistent during the same timespan.
Regression analysis is applied to test the hypotheses. Differences in the effect of the welfare regimes as well as the temporal changes are analyzed by interaction terms between time and country groups.
