Real wages will decline across Europe in 2022 | DiePress.com

Study: The loss of purchasing power in Austria is 3.7 percent, the EU average is 4
percent. Only in Bulgaria real wages have increased.

Real wages for employees have collapsed in the past year, not only in Austria, but in almost all EU countries. The purchasing power of employees has fallen in 26 of the 27 countries of the European Union, according to a wage report published on Tuesday by the Institute for Economic and Social Sciences (WSI) of the trade union foundation Hans Bückler. The only exception was the low-wage nation of Bulgaria, where real wages rose by 4.7 percent.

According to the study, the average European Union loss in purchasing power was 4 percent. In Austria it was 3.7 percent, in neighboring Germany 4.1 percent. There were particularly large losses in Estonia (9.3 percent), Greece (8.2 percent) and the Czech Republic (8.1 percent).

redistribution at the expense of wages

High inflation rates are responsible for the decline in real wages. While these were initially driven by rising import prices for fossil fuels and food, increasing corporate profits are now also contributing significantly to the upward trend, WSI wrote.

WSI experts report that due to the imbalance between the development of wages and earnings, the share of wages in national income has decreased significantly. At the EU level, the share of wages fell by about two percentage points between 2020 and the end of 2022. “In the middle of the crisis, there was a “redistribution away from wages and in favor of capital income,” said WSI researchers Thilo Janssen and Malte Lübke. (APA )