Overeducation or structural change? An analysis of the impact of ICT, university training and organisational change of business salaries

Abstract

The severity of the current economic crisis has shown the need to profoundly transform the productive structure of many economies all over the world. With the major increase in unemployment, the need has been considered for major training and structural change, for both workers and companies, to improve their competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. With this objective, international empirical evidence has demonstrated the existence of new co-innovative sources (in particular the establishment of complementary relations between the intensive use of information and communication technologies (ICT), organisational change and training for competitive change) which explain the increases in productivity and competitiveness of companies, the creation of jobs and improvements in salary for qualified workers. In parallel, the empirical evidence available demonstrates a problem of relative overeducation, in the sense that, for specific categories, there is no correlation between higher levels of training and improved salaries at work. Based on the data from a representative sample of private enterprises in Catalonia (2,038 companies), we have looked at the impact of structural change (co-innovative sources) and overeducation related to salaries in the company. The results suggest that: 1) individual characteristics of the employees (level and extension of training) and of the company (efficiency and complimentarity between organisational and technological change) determine salary levels in the Catalan company; 2) overeducation is not present in the business category where there is intensive use of knowledge and technology; 3) overeducation does exist in the business category where there is not intensive use of knowledge and technology; 4) for the companies using intensive technology and knowledge, a minority competitive number but very relevant for a competitive future, structural change in the determination of salary may be important; and 5) in contrast, in the majority of Catalan companies - which make little use of technology and knowledge - a problem of overeducation has been detected, linked, among other things, to the low importance of structural change in their salary levels.