| Abstract [eng] |
The main goal of this master's thesis is to determine the influence of social and economic factors on the average and minimum wage after analyzing the meaning of the wage, the taxes related to it in a historical aspect. The work consists of three main parts; literature analysis (chapter 1) and research and its results as well as conclusions and recommendations. The literature analysis reviews and compares different definitions of wages and analyzes wage components. The main functions of the wage are also named and the factors determining it are analyzed through a social and economic prism, the change in the minimum wage and the factors determining it are examined from a historical point of view. The classification of wage taxes is also carried out and different amounts of wage taxes are analyzed according to the Baltic countries. The second part describes the research methodology. The third part assessed how rapidly the minimum and average wages rose in the Baltic countries, analyzed employee and employer wage taxes in the historical period, calculated the price of a workplace and determined the correlation of social and economic factors and the dependence on average and minimum wages. After analyzing the literature, the author conducted a study on the dependence of average and minimum wages (using the correlation and regression method) on social and economic factors in the Baltic countries under consideration (in the period 2015-2023) and determined in which country the taxation of labor and the cost of the workplace is the highest. the average and minimum wages are rising the fastest. The conducted research revealed that the highest price of a workplace is in Estonia and amounts to 2422.78 euros, and the lowest in Latvia is 1899.94 euros, which means that the cheapest workforce is precisely in Latvia, assuming that the same employee would be paid an average in each country salary. The average wage is the lowest in Latvia. In Latvia, employee and employer taxes make up 54.09 percent, in Estonia 55.4 percent, and in Lithuania 41.27 percent. During the research, regression models were created for each country and separately for economic and social indicators. In order to avoid the risk of multicollinearity, the GDP and GDP per capita regressors were removed. Regression models describe the effect of socioeconomic variables on wages. This division was adopted in order to reduce the number of variables in the model and to obtain more reliable results. After performing a more detailed analysis of the dependence of each variable on wages, it was observed that in the three Baltic countries there is a strong positive correlation and regression dependence between work productivity, the percentage of persons with at least secondary education 25-64 age group, net migration and the number of employed persons (especially in Estonia) with minimum and average wages. A strong correlation was observed between GDP, GDP per capita. No correlation or dependence was observed between the expected duration of the population and wages. A moderately strong relationship between wages and direct foreign investment and inflation is established, but the coefficient of determination does not show the dependence of investment on wages. The conclusions summarize the wage components, functions, factors that determine it, and also present the tax rates of the main Baltic countries and the analysis of changes in the minimum wage. The author believes that the results of the study could provide useful guidelines for anyone considering starting a new business in the Baltic countries, as a person could take into account which social and economic indicators correlate with wages, which indicators are dependent and in which countries the cost of a workplace is the highest. |
