The gap in salaries between management and workers in Spain grew by 4 percent in the course of 2012, a latest report on earnings drawn up by the EADA Business School and human resources consultancy ICSA showed.

The study, published on Wednesday, was based on 80,000 different pieces of data regarding salaries from all of the country.

Despite the facts that over 400,000 Spanish jobs disappeared in 2012 and that around 5 million Spaniards are now out of work, the average earning for top managers rose by 3.16 percent over the past the year to 75,106 euros (about 98,000 U.S. dollars) a year.

Average earning for middle management in the meantime remained largely stable at 37,700 euros.

On the other hand, the average earnings of employees fell by 1 percent to 21,408 euros a year.

"Managers were the first to become aware of the crisis and have been able to reorient their earnings, while employees were still feeling the effects of collective agreements and now we could be seeing the opposite effect," explained Jordi Costa, a professor with the Barcelona-based institute EADA.

Official figures published on Wednesday showed that the disposable income of average Spanish households fell by 1.6 percent in the third quarter of 2012.