I was looking for some data on minimum wages in various countries and found that Wikipedia (perhaps unsurprisingly) has a very nice,
well-annotated table. After downloading the data & cleaning it a bit (harder than it should be), I made several plots. There were too many countries for one plot, so I made one for each (approximate) quartile. At the end of the blog post is the R code I used for fetching the data & making the plots.
Fourth Quartile
NB: Some countries have exemption policies for worker or occupation characteristics, so for a more complete understanding, of say, why Australia appears to have a minimum wage more than 2x the US minimum wage, check the Wikipedia table.
Third Quartile
Second Quartile
First Quartile
Distribution of Minimum Wages
Below is a some R code for grabbing the table of country-specific minimum wages from Wikipedia.
Nice job! It would be very interesting to weigh countries by their population.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great idea - I actually did the same "pull from Wikipedia" method for country population---I should put it online. I also made some plots showing oDesk mean wages versus country minimum wage---it's amazing how much higher mean oDesk wages are--- e.g., Bangladesh is about 40x.
DeleteVery nice graph there, but where is Germany?
ReplyDelete