The aim of this paper is to quantify immigrant-native wage gaps in the European Union countries putting special attention to the role of favourable or unfavourable policies supporting the labour market integration of recently arrived immigrants. Analysing data from MIPEX for the period 2007-2010, we identify that nearly all new EU member states (EU-12) have unfavourable policies while in the old EU member states (EU-15) there are two clear groups of countries: one formed by Austria, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg and the United Kingdom with less favourable policies and a second one formed by Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden where policies are more favourable. Using cross-sectional microdata from the EU-SILC, we estimate separate Mincer equations for the three groups of countries. Our results show that wage differentials between immigrant and natives are lower in those countries with more favourable policies, but this is the result of a better relative situation of medium-skilled workers and not of highly-qualified ones. In any case, the wage gap for immigrants in EU-15 countries is clearly lower than for those arriving at EU-12 countries. However, although our results suggests that these policies do have some effects on immigrants’ labour market integration, it is not possible to disentangle which part of the effect is due to this particular measure, to other migration policy or even to ‘non-migration policies’.
Immigrant‐native wage gaps and the returns to human capital
MIPEX Team
MIPEX 2015 team is formed by the members of CIDOB and MPG, the leading organization of the “Integration policies: Who benefits? The development and use of indicators in integration debates” project.
