The impact of sectoral minimum wage laws on employment, wages, and hours of work in South Africa

IZA Journal of Labor & Development

Table 1 Mean sample characteristics of sector and control groups in the pre-law period (March and September waves)

Minimum wage sector (Treatment group)	Retail	Domestic Workers	Forestry	Taxi	Security
African	0.57^*	0.90^*	0.98^*	0.96^*	0.84
Male	0.51^*	0.04	0.66^*	0.97	0.89
Age	34.1^*	39.6^*	35.5^*	34.8	33.0^*
Years of schooling	10.4^*	6.1^*	5.3^*	8.9^*	10.0^*
Area A/Metropolitan area	0.82	0.78	0.47^*	0.79	0.86
Wage Gap	0.70	0.91	0.73	0.31	0.74
Control groups	Retail	Domestic Workers	Forestry	Taxi	Security
African	0.67	0.77	0.84	0.89	0.89
Male	0.71	0	0.72	1	1
Age	36	34.2	33.4	35.7	35.7
Years of schooling	8.5	7.6	8.1	8.4	7.9
Area A/Metropolitan area	0.82	0.77	0.80	0.82	0.82
F-statistic	395.0^***	116.6^***	26.5^***	293.7^***	50.2^***

Source: Data are from South African Labour Force Surveys (LFS) (September and March waves) conducted by Statistics South Africa.
Note: Estimates are weighted means for the pooled dataset that includes both September and March waves for the pre-law period in each sector. Sample includes non self-employed, non-government workers only aged between 15 and 65 years inclusive. All control groups were restricted to non self-employed, non-government and non-unionized workers who were not in sectors affected by minimum wage laws. Where relevant, a test for the equality of means between the treatment and the control group was performed. An asterisk indicates that the null hypothesis for the equality of means of the treatment and the control group was rejected at the 5 percent level. The F-statistic uses a Hotelling’s test for the joint equality of the means of the set of demographic variables between each respective treatment and control group in the pre-law period. The Null hypothesis assumes the joint equality of means of all demographic variables across each treatment/control group for each sector and is rejected at the 1% level for each treatment and control group comparison.