Gender Wage Gap and Discrimination in Developing Countries

This study constructs wage equations according to Mincer earnings function for men and women separately, and the equations are estimated by OLS and Heckman selection regression for eleven developing countries. Our results show that the wage equation estimates for five countries including Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Macedonia Lao and Yunnan, China have the selection bias. Comparing the estimates of female wage equations and male wage equations, we find that better education raise wages for women than men, and women who work as high skill white collar receive more benefits than female. In terms of gender wage gap analysis, we conduct the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition for each of countries by the estimates of OLS regression and Heckman regressions. The results reveal a relatively high level of gender wage discrimination in Yunnan province, Macedonia, Sri Lanka and Ukraine. For most of countries, the unexplained wage gap contributes more to the total wage gap, comparing with the explained wage gap. However, this is no strong evidence to show that the wage discrimination is correlated with national economic development