UNU-MERIT Working Papers Series
Employment and wages of people living with HIV/AIDS
Pilar García-Gómez, José M. Labeaga Azcona & Juan Oliva #2012-043The therapeutic advances that have taken place since the mid 1990s have
profoundly affected the situation of people living with HIV/AIDS, not
only in terms of life expectancy and quality of life but also
socio-economically. This has numerous effects on different aspects of
the patients' life and, especially, on their working life. We analyse in
this paper labour force participation and wages of people living with
HIV/AIDS in Spain. We select a control group from the general
population. We find that the employment probability decreases by 16.4
percentage points among asymptomatic HIV patients, by 22.5 percentage
points among symptomatic HIV patients, and as much as by 41.3 percentage
points if the person is in the AIDS phase. In addition, wages of HIV
patients are from 9 to 34 per cent (if infected by Intravenous Drug Use)
lower. Gender, educational attainment, unearned income, HIV clinical
indicators and number of household members are the main determinants of
the employment probability of HIV patients. On the other hand, wages do
not play a significant role in employment decisions of these
individuals.
Keywords: HIV/AIDS; labour supply; wages; unearned income
JEL Class.: I1, J20
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