You should look at all salaries. Broadly US salaries are much higher across the board - whether in IT, finance, engineering, industry etc. So the question should be is how to raise salaries in Europe. Broadly, in economics salaries are tied to productivity. This is best captured by total factor productivity. So you would need to make economies more productive across the board. You can also generally predict the highest salaries with this. What is the most productive economy in Europe? Switzerland. Where are the highest salaries? Also Switzerland.