Minimum wage and employment: a gender perspective for Mauritius

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the employment effect of the minimum wage in Mauritius, a country that has recently introduced an economy-wide national minimum wage. As women have low labor force participation rate and higher unemployment rate compared to men, this study sheds light on the impact of the national minimum wage on male and female employment.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual framework based on the labor–leisure model of Blundell et al. (2007) incorporating the minimum wage as an important variable influencing the employment decision of the individual serves as the methodological backdrop of this paper. It applies the difference-in-difference estimation technique and uses micro data from the Continuous Multi-Purpose Household Survey for the period 2017–2019.FindingsThe results show that minimum wage has a significant negative impact on overall employment. With the imposition of the national minimum wage, the probability that an individual, currently earning less than the minimum wage, remains employed is 0.525 lower than that of a worker earning above the minimum wage level. Moreover, using sex-disaggregated data, the analysis demonstrates the negative employment effects of the minimum wage adversely impact women more than men.Originality/valueThis is a first attempt to estimate the effect of the newly introduced national minimum wage on employment in Mauritius. While the effects of a minimum wage vary across different segments of the economy, this study adopts a gender perspective by comparing the impact of the minimum wage on male and female employment.

Does Minimum Wage Reduces Gender Inequality in Indonesia?

“…Based on human capital theory posits that heightened investments in education will provoke the generation of employment opportunities (Chen & Wu, 2007). While Dreepaul-Dabee & Tandrayen-Ragoobur (2023) shows that through the utilization of sexdisaggregated data, the analysis elucidates that the deleterious employment repercussions of the minimum wage disproportionately affect women in a more pronounced manner than men.At the tertiary level, intriguingly, the introduction of minimum wage exhibits a negligible impact on male workers, while manifesting a positive and statistically significant effect on their female counterparts. This phenomenon could be attributed, in part, to the "creeping" or consequential influence of the glass ceiling, where women might find themselves compelled to accept positions below their qualifications.…”