Employee compensation as a function of the sectoral structure of the economy

Employee compensation is the factor that determines the directions of economic development. Yet, at the same time, the structure of the economy influences employee compensation. Due to the importance of the structure of the economy, the purpose of the paper is to examine the structure factors that influence compensation in the EU Member States in the period 2013–2020. In particular, it investigates the importance of traditional and modern economic structures for employee compensation. In the paper, a multi-level analysis was applied. The research showed that the systematic transformation of the economy towards modern branches in favour of the traditional ones caused an increase of compensation. This is an alternative result in relation to some observations in the subject literature, where it is often emphasized that robotisation and AI cause an increase in unemployment and a decrease in employee compensation. On the other hand, it is impossible to completely replace the traditional sectors. Hence, the most appropriate direction seems to be a gradual increase in efficiency in underdeveloped sectors of the economy without abandoning them entirely.