Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Wage dispersion is an economic term which refers to the amount of variation in wages encountered in an economy.European countries have in general much less wage dispersion than the U.S. does. This is due to the fact the US are dealing with competition from abroad in a different way; they allowed the wages of lower-skilled workers to fall relative to those of highly skilled ones (under the premise of keeping some of the jobs that might have been outsourced).