Autor: Cerimelo Manuela, de la Vega Pablo, Porto Natalia
Institución: UNLP
Año: 2023
JEL: E24, Q50
Resumen:
This paper estimates wage differentials between green and non-green jobs (wage greenium) in nine major Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay), which account for 81% of the region’s GDP.We contribute to the recent literature highlighting a positive wage gap for those working in green jobs in developed countries and explore possible heterogeneities that may arise within countries in the same region. A positive wage gap for green jobs may be a virtuous market feature, as it means that in the future workers might be encouraged to switch to greener occupations. To do so, we define green jobs as those occupations with high greenness scores using the occupational approach as in Vona et al. (2018), Vona (2021) and Porto et al. (2022). Our results suggest that the wage greenium for the period 2012-2019 was, on average, 23% in Latin America, ranging from 15% to 30%. Moreover, this wage gap has remained relatively stable over the years.