Disparidades regionales en la tasa de paro: El papel del mecanismo de determinación salarial

In the last decades, the existence of significative and persistent differences among the regional unemployment rates has fostered a renewed interest in the analysis of the characteristics of the labour market at the regional level. The aim of this paper is to show the degree of rigidness and homogeneity of the Spanish manufacturing wage setting mechanism and the impact of such fact on the regional employment evolution. For such we estimate a wage setting equation at the regional level with manfacturing data, and our results confirm the existence of the marked industrial differences detected at the national level concerning the relationship between wages and productivity. However, for each industry the performance among regions is quite homogeneous, which could be explained by a wage bargaining system where the industry-level agreement is more common than the firm-level agreement. These marked differences between industries may well explain the recent evolution of the regional labor markets.