What was asked

• 01If a minimum wage is priced in months of one person's survival, how many people does one actually buy?
• 02Does the wage a province sets respond to what living in that province costs?
• 03Is there a way to check that does not require anybody to draw a poverty line at all?
• 04Is the legal floor still a floor, or has it become the going rate?

What it found

A minimum wage is an answer to a question: what does it cost to live here? Divide it by the cost of one person and the answer arrives in a unit anybody can picture. In the median province one minimum wage holds 4.77 people above the poverty line — and across the panel the figure runs from 2.79 to 8.86. The same legal category, meaning very different things in different places, and the spread has not narrowed since 2015. Then the harder result. Regressed with province fixed effects, the wage tracks its province's own poverty line almost exactly (+1.146). Add year fixed effects and the relationship vanishes (−0.262, interval crossing zero). The apparent tracking was the national inflation trend the whole time. A wage set by a national formula cannot track a local cost, and this is that fact arriving as a coefficient. Before any of it: the file carries a national aggregate among its provinces, and one of its wage columns is scrambled. Both are shown rather than silently repaired.