INFLUENCE OF ATTAINED LEVEL OF EDUCATION ON WAGES IN THE CZECH ECONOMY

During the long-term research of relations within the Czech economy we have encountered the need to monitor the relationship of wages and the attained level of education. Besides this relationship, we identified as significant to compare the year-on-year change in the level of wages with the year-on-year change in GDP. In particular, the comparison with GDP sheds light on whether wage growth is adequate with relation to labour productivity growth or not.

In this article we present the structure of employees from the perspective of their education in the Czech economy. Another analysis included in the article is the analysis of the median wage of employees in the Czech economy for the period 2000-2017 by level of education. The comparison that we are making deals mainly with the evolution of wages, as represented by the median income.

For the purposes of our investigation, we have formulated the following research questions:
RQ1: What is the evolution of the structure of workers in the Czech economy by level of education in 2000 – 2017?
RQ2: Compare the median wages of the Czech Republic to the median wages of levels of education.
RQ3: Are year-on-year wage changes conditional on year-on-year GDP changes?

Above mentioned research questions are reflecting really frequent information about changes in average wage, general increase of average wage etc. As mentioned, these discussions are really frequent, but it is not reflecting secondary factors like education, region, age, relation to changes in GDP etc. This paper is analyzing relation to education and GDP only.

Through analysis of the data, we have come to the finding that the median wage of those with only elementary education or secondary trade training is permanently under the median wage of the Czech Republic by 28 % or respectively by 11 %. On the other hand, in the case of post-secondary Master’s degree education, wages are above the median wage of the Czech Republic by almost 40 %. From the perspective of evolution of wages versus the development of the GDP, we have found out that after 2013 the year-on-year growth rates were higher for the gross domestic product (GDP) than for the wages.