Looking for Wage Growth? Ask Latvia’s Central Bank Governor
Looking for Wage Growth? Ask Latvia’s Central Bank Governor
(Bloomberg) -- Europe’s central bankers, desperately scouring the landscape for signs of pay growth, would do well to look to their own Baltic peers.
The central bank governors of those euro members saw the biggest annual pay increases of the group last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Latvian Governor Ilmars Rimsevics’s gross pay rose 10 percent to about 151,000 euros ($179,000), Lithuania’s Vitas Vasiliauskas’s salary increased almost 7 percent to around 89,000 euros and Estonia’s Ardo Hansson’s wage grew about 5 percent to 116,000 euros.
That may reflect inflation, given that price growth in the Baltic countries is about to two to three times higher than in the euro-area as a whole. Their economic growth is also twice the pace.
Even so, that still leaves Belgium’s Jan Smets holding the highest gross wage at 481,000 euros – almost five times that of his Lithuanian counterpart. But central-banker compensation in the bloc doesn’t necessarily correlate with seniority or economic heft.
Luxembourg – the region’s wealthiest nation – paid its head Gaston Reinesch 181,000 euros last year, the same as in 2015 and among the lowest of the group. And while ECB President, Mario Draghi got a 1 percent raise to 389,760 euros last year – outstripping feeble euro-area inflation – that still leaves his pay lagging behind his Belgian, Italian and German colleagues. He also benefits from low taxes.
--With assistance from Radoslav Tomek Boris Cerni Milda Seputyte Ott Ummelas Maria Tadeo Georgios Georgiou Lorenzo Totaro Joao Lima Christos Ziotis Mark Deen and Stephanie Bodoni
To contact the author of this story: Aaron Eglitis in Riga at aeglitis@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lucy Meakin at lmeakin1@bloomberg.net, Jonas O Bergman
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