Commuting in the Baltic States: Patterns, determinants and gains

Arbeitspapier

To what extent does commuting reduce urban – rural and regional wage disparities? This question is addressed by estimating two sets of earnings functions (based on 2000 LFS data for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania): with location variables (like capital city, rural etc.) measured at the workplace and at the place of residence. The main finding is that in Estonia and Latvia commuting has significantly narrowed the ceteris paribus wage gap between capital city and rural areas, as well as between capital and other cities. In Lithuania only residents of urban areas in the capital county manage to catch up significantly with the capital, while overall urban-rural gap remains almost unchanged. So different outcomes are explained by country-specific skills composition of rural – urban commuting flows and wage discrimination against rural residents in Lithuanian urban markets. Individual gains to rural – urban or inter-city commuting (both with and without correcting to selectivity) are uniformly big in Latvia but on average negligible in Lithuanian urban areas.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: ZEI Working Paper ; No. B 02-2003

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials ; Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers ; Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics ; Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement ; Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models: Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions; Social Interaction Models ; Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models: Discrete Regression and Qualitative Choice Models; Discrete Regressors; Proportions
• Subject: commuting ; earnings functions ; treatment effects model ; wage disparities ; Baltic States ; ethnic minority

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Hazans, Mihails
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Zentrum für Europäische Integrationsforschung (ZEI)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2003

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/39596
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET