ABSTRACT

When the Great Depression hit Greece in 2009, the country was extremely ill-prepared to deal with the consequences and the new threats that emerged, with much of the burden falling on the labour market. In part, this had to do with the level and depth of knowledge about the workings of the market, for example, the sources of wage disparity across workers and jobs. Before the crisis, a large, albeit mainly descriptive, volume of research focused on issues of wage-setting, collective bargaining, and industrial relations (see Kornelakis and Voskeritsian 2014 for a review). Yet, studies that enlighten policy-makers about the presence of disequilibria, at large and across sectors of the economy, and the extent of inefficiency associated with these were lacking. To a large degree, this remains the case today despite the relative blooming of academic research in the country after the eruption of the crisis. The sources of wage disparities in labour markets and across sectors are generally not easy to track, and even the international literature remains inconclusive. Researchers do not fully understand why similar workers who do similar work in different sectors of the economy often receive different wages. In this chapter, we study how inter-sectoral wage differentials in Greece evolved before and during the recent crisis and try to uncover their sources, also asking the pertinent question of how the crisis has influenced both the level and the drivers of such differentials.