Employment and wages of people living with HIV/AIDS


Pilar García-Gómez, José M. Labeaga Azcona & Juan Oliva

#2012-043

The 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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