The Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) held its fourth seminar on structural issues with an impact on the sustainability of the public finances today, this time focusing on the impact of rises in the minimum wage (Spanish acronym: SMI) on Social Security contributions and employment.
AIReF inaugurated this cycle of seminars last October with the aim of complementing its own analyses, with a view to updating the Long-term Sustainability Opinion that AIReF will publish in March 2025.
In the fourth session, AIReF’s Economic Analysis Division began by introducing the institution’s work to analyse the impact of the minimum wage. Begoña Cueto, Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Oviedo and Vice-President of the Spanish Association of Labour Economics, and Inmaculada Cebrián, Lecturer in the Fundamentals of Economic Analysis in the Department of Economics at the University of Alcalá de Henares, gave a speech on the experiences and challenges of the minimum wage. For his part, FEDEA researcher and Associate Professor of Economics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Marcel Jansen, offered his views on the effects of minimum wage increases on companies, while ISEAK researcher Gonzalo Romero spoke about the impact of increases in the minimum wage on employment.
With this fourth session, AIReF brings the series of seminars to a close following the previous sessions in which it analysed the outlook for the evolution of productivity; the implications of the labour reform on employment, productivity and immigration, and the labour market; and the outlook for the evolution of participation rates.