Download or read book Employment Protection Deregulation and Labor Shares in Advanced Economies written by Gabriele Ciminelli and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labor market deregulation, intended to boost productivity and employment, is one plausible, yet little studied, driver of the decline in labor shares that took place across most advanced economies since the early 1990s. This paper assesses the impact of job protection deregulation in a sample of 26 advanced economies over the period 1970-2015, using a newly constructed dataset of major reforms to employment protection legislation for regular contracts. We apply the local projection method to estimate the dynamic response of the labor share to our reform events at both the country and the country-industry levels. For the latter, we employ a differences-in-differences identification strategy using two identifying assumptions grounded in theory—namely that job protection deregulation should have larger negative effects in industries characterized by (i) a higher “natural” propensity to adjust the workforce, and (ii) a lower elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. We find a statistically significant, economically large and robust negative effect of deregulation on the labor share. In particular, illustrative back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that job protection deregulation may have contributed about 15 percent to the average labor share decline in advanced economies. Together with existing evidence regarding the macroeconomic gains from job protection and other labor market reforms, our results also point to the need for policymakers to address efficiency-equity trade-offs when designing such reforms.

Download or read book For the Benefit of All Fiscal Policies and Equity Efficiency Trade offs in the Age of Automation written by Mr. Andrew Berg and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many studies predict massive job losses and real wage decline as a result of the ongoing widespread automation of production, a trend that may be further aggravated by the COVID-19 crisis. Yet automation is also expected to raise productivity and output. How can we share the gains from automation more widely, for the benefit of all? And what are the attendant equity-efficiency trade-offs? We analyze this issue by considering the effects of fiscal policies that seek to redistribute the gains from automation and address income inequality. We use a dynamic general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition, including a novel specification linking corporate power to automation. While fiscal policy cannot eliminate the classic equity-efficiency trade-offs, it can help improve them, reducing inequality at small or no loss of output. This is particularly so when policy takes advantage of novel, less distortive transmission channels of fiscal policy created by the empirically observed link between corporate market power and automation.

Download or read book Why Is Labor Receiving a Smaller Share of Global Income Theory and Empirical Evidence written by Mai Chi Dao and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper documents the downward trend in the labor share of global income since the early 1990s, as well as its heterogeneous evolution across countries, industries and worker skill groups, using a newly assembled dataset, and analyzes the drivers behind it. Technological progress, along with varying exposure to routine occupations, explains about half the overall decline in advanced economies, with a larger negative impact on middle-skilled workers. In emerging markets, the labor share evolution is explained predominantly by global integration, particularly the expansion of global value chains that contributed to raising the overall capital intensity in production.

Download or read book China s Productivity Convergence and Growth Potential A Stocktaking and Sectoral Approach written by Min Zhu and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s growth potential has become a hotly debated topic as the economy has reached an income level susceptible to the “middle-income trap” and financial vulnerabilities are mounting after years of rapid credit expansion. However, the existing literature has largely focused on macro level aggregates, which are ill suited to understanding China’s significant structural transformation and its impact on economic growth. To fill the gap, this paper takes a deep dive into China’s convergence progress in 38 industrial sectors and 11 services sectors, examines past sectoral transitions, and predicts future shifts. We find that China’s productivity convergence remains at an early stage, with the industrial sector more advanced than services. Large variations exist among subsectors, with high-tech industrial sectors, in particular the ICT sector, lagging low-tech sectors. Going forward, ample room remains for further convergence, but the shrinking distance to the frontier, the structural shift from industry to services, and demographic changes will put sustained downward pressure on growth, which could slow to 5 percent by 2025 and 4 percent by 2030. Digitalization, SOE reform, and services sector opening up could be three major forces boosting future growth, while the risks of a financial crisis and a reversal in global integration in trade and technology could slow the pace of convergence.

Download or read book The Great Reversal written by Thomas Philippon and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Book of the Year A ProMarket Book of the Year “Superbly argued and important...Donald Trump is in so many ways a product of the defective capitalism described in The Great Reversal. What the U.S. needs, instead, is another Teddy Roosevelt and his energetic trust-busting. Is that still imaginable? All believers in the virtues of competitive capitalism must hope so.” —Martin Wolf, Financial Times “In one industry after another...a few companies have grown so large that they have the power to keep prices high and wages low. It’s great for those corporations—and bad for almost everyone else.” —David Leonhardt, New York Times “Argues that the United States has much to gain by reforming how domestic markets work but also much to regain—a vitality that has been lost since the Reagan years...His analysis points to one way of making America great again: restoring our free-market competitiveness.” —Arthur Herman, Wall Street Journal Why are cell-phone plans so much more expensive in the United States than in Europe? It seems a simple question, but the search for an answer took one of the world’s leading economists on an unexpected journey through some of the most hotly debated issues in his field. He reached a surprising conclusion: American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on healthy competition. In the age of Silicon Valley start-ups and millennial millionaires, he hardly expected this. But the data from his cutting-edge research proved undeniable. In this compelling tale of economic detective work, we follow Thomas Philippon as he works out the facts and consequences of industry concentration, shows how lobbying and campaign contributions have defanged antitrust regulators, and considers what all this means. Philippon argues that many key problems of the American economy are due not to the flaws of capitalism or globalization but to the concentration of corporate power. By lobbying against competition, the biggest firms drive profits higher while depressing wages and limiting opportunities for investment, innovation, and growth. For the sake of ordinary Americans, he concludes, government needs to get back to what it once did best: keeping the playing field level for competition. It’s time to make American markets great—and free—again.

Download or read book The Fissured Workplace written by David Weil and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety protections, and ever-widening income inequality. From the perspectives of CEOs and investors, fissuring--splitting off functions that were once managed internally--has been phenomenally successful. Despite giving up direct control to subcontractors and franchises, these large companies have figured out how to maintain the quality of brand-name products and services, without the cost of maintaining an expensive workforce. But from the perspective of workers, this strategy has meant stagnation in wages and benefits and a lower standard of living. Weil proposes ways to modernize regulatory policies so that employers can meet their obligations to workers while allowing companies to keep the beneficial aspects of this business strategy.

Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Download or read book Making It Big written by Andrea Ciani and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic and social progress requires a diverse ecosystem of firms that play complementary roles. Making It Big: Why Developing Countries Need More Large Firms constitutes one of the most up-to-date assessments of how large firms are created in low- and middle-income countries and their role in development. It argues that large firms advance a range of development objectives in ways that other firms do not: large firms are more likely to innovate, export, and offer training and are more likely to adopt international standards of quality, among other contributions. Their particularities are closely associated with productivity advantages and translate into improved outcomes not only for their owners but also for their workers and for smaller enterprises in their value chains. The challenge for economic development, however, is that production does not reach economic scale in low- and middle-income countries. Why are large firms scarcer in developing countries? Drawing on a rare set of data from public and private sources, as well as proprietary data from the International Finance Corporation and case studies, this book shows that large firms are often born large—or with the attributes of largeness. In other words, what is distinct about them is often in place from day one of their operations. To fill the “missing top†? of the firm-size distribution with additional large firms, governments should support the creation of such firms by opening markets to greater competition. In low-income countries, this objective can be achieved through simple policy reorientation, such as breaking oligopolies, removing unnecessary restrictions to international trade and investment, and establishing strong rules to prevent the abuse of market power. Governments should also strive to ensure that private actors have the skills, technology, intelligence, infrastructure, and finance they need to create large ventures. Additionally, they should actively work to spread the benefits from production at scale across the largest possible number of market participants. This book seeks to bring frontier thinking and evidence on the role and origins of large firms to a wide range of readers, including academics, development practitioners and policy makers.

Download or read book Growth and Structural Transformation written by Kwang Suk Kim and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study provides a comprehensive overview of Korea’s macroeconomic growth and structural change since World War II, and traces some of the roots of development to the colonial period. The authors explore in detail colonial development, changing national income patterns, relative price shifts, sources of aggregate growth, and sources of sectoral structural change, comparing them with other countries.

Download or read book Dynamics of Wages written by A. N. Mathur and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt written by Paolo Verme and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt: Facts and Perceptions Across People, Time, and Space comprises four papers prepared in the framework of the Egypt inequality study financed by the World Bank. The first paper, by Sherine Al-Shawarby, reviews the studies on inequality in Egypt since the 1950s with the double objective of illustrating the importance attributed to inequality through time and of presenting and compare the main published statistics on inequality. The second paper, by Branko Milanovic, turns to the global and spatial dimensions of inequality. The Egyptian society remains deeply divided across space and in terms of welfare, and this study unveils some of the hidden features of this inequality. The third paper, by Paolo Verme, studies facts and perceptions of inequality during the 2000-2009 period, which preceded the Egyptian revolution. The fourth paper, by Sahar El Tawila, May Gadallah, and Enas Ali A.El-Majeed, assesses the state of poverty and inequality among the poorest villages of Egypt. The paper attempts to explain the level of inequality in an effort to disentangle those factors that derive from household abilities from those factors that derive from local opportunities. Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt provides some initial elements that could explain the apparent mismatch between inequality measured with household surveys and inequality aversion measured by values surveys. This is a particularly important and timely topic to address in light of the unfolding developments in the Arab region. The book should be of interest to any observer of the political and economic evolution of the Arab region in the past few years and to poverty and inequality specialists interested in a deeper understanding of the distribution of incomes in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. World Bank Studies are available individually or on standing order. The World Bank Studies series is also available online through the Open Knowledge Repository (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/) and the World Bank e-Library (www.worldbank.org/elibrary). Book jacket.

Download or read book Global Waves of Debt written by M. Ayhan Kose and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2021-03-03 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global economy has experienced four waves of rapid debt accumulation over the past 50 years. The first three debt waves ended with financial crises in many emerging market and developing economies. During the current wave, which started in 2010, the increase in debt in these economies has already been larger, faster, and broader-based than in the previous three waves. Current low interest rates mitigate some of the risks associated with high debt. However, emerging market and developing economies are also confronted by weak growth prospects, mounting vulnerabilities, and elevated global risks. A menu of policy options is available to reduce the likelihood that the current debt wave will end in crisis and, if crises do take place, will alleviate their impact.

Download or read book International Productivity Monitor written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-17 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 32nd issue of the International Productivity Monitor is a special issue produced in collaboration with the OECD. All articles published in this issue were selected from papers presented at the First Annual Conference of the OECD Global Forum on Productivity held in Lisbon, Portugal, July ...

Download or read book The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices written by Robert J. Gordon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American business has recently been under fire, charged with inflated pricing and an inability to compete in the international marketplace. However, the evidence presented in this volume shows that the business community has been unfairly maligned—official measures of inflation and the standard of living have failed to account for progress in the quality of business equipment and consumer goods. Businesses have actually achieved higher productivity at lower prices, and new goods are lighter, faster, more energy efficient, and more reliable than their predecessors. Robert J. Gordon has written the first full-scale work to treat the extent of quality changes over the entire range of durable goods, from autos to aircraft, computers to compressors, from televisions to tractors. He combines and extends existing methods of measurement, drawing data from industry sources, Consumer Reports, and the venerable Sears catalog. Beyond his important finding that the American economy is more sound than officially recognized, Gordon provides a wealth of anecdotes tracing the postwar history of technological progress. Bolstering his argument that improved quality must be accurately measured, Gordon notes, for example, that today's mid-range personal computers outperform the multimillion-dollar mainframes of the 1970s. This remarkable book will be essential reading for economists and those in the business community.

Download or read book Great Depressions of the Twentieth Century written by Timothy Jerome Kehoe and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s was a watershed for both economic thought and economic policymaking. It led to the belief that market economies are inherently unstable and to the revolutionary work of John Maynard Keynes. Its impact on popular economic wisdom is still apparent today. Great Depressions of the Twentieth Century, which uses a common framework to study sixteen depressions from the interwar period in Europe and America, as well as from more recent times in Japan and Latin America, challenges the Keynesian theory of depressions. It develops and uses a methodology for studying depressions that relies on growth accounting and the general equilibrium growth model. Different chapters in this book analyze the depressions in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the 1930s, the depressions in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico in the 1980s, and recent depressions in Argentina, Finland, Japan, New Zealand, and Switzerland. Besides the editors themselves, the contributors are Pedro Amaral, Paul Beaudry, Raphael Bergoeing, Mirta Bugarin, Harold Cole, Juan Carlos Conesa, Mario Crucini, Roberto Ellery, Victor Gomes, Jonas Fisher, Fumio Hayashi, Andreas Hornstein, James Kahn, Patrick Kehoe, Finn Kydland, James MacGee, Lee Ohanian, Fabrizio Perri, Franck Portier, Vincenzo Quadrini, Kim Ruhl, Raimundo Soto, Arilton Teixeira, and Carlos Zarazaga.

Download or read book Let Their People Come written by Lant Pritchett and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2006-09-15 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Let Their People Come, Lant Pritchett discusses five "irresistible forces" of global labor migration, and the "immovable ideas" that form a political backlash against it. Increasing wage gaps, different demographic futures, "everything but labor" globalization, and the continued employment growth in low skilled, labor intensive industries all contribute to the forces compelling labor to migrate across national borders. Pritchett analyzes the fifth irresistible force of "ghosts and zombies," or the rapid and massive shifts in desired populations of countries, and says that this aspect has been neglected in the discussion of global labor mobility. Let Their People Come provides six policy recommendations for unskilled immigration policy that seek to reconcile the irresistible force of migration with the immovable ideas in rich countries that keep this force in check. In clear, accessible prose, this volume explores ways to regulate migration flows so that they are a benefit to both the global North and global South.

Download or read book The Profit Paradox written by Jan Eeckhout and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power—and how it stifles workers around the world In an era of technological progress and easy communication, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power—the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil. The Profit Paradox describes how, over the past forty years, a handful of companies have reaped most of the rewards of technological advancements—acquiring rivals, securing huge profits, and creating brutally unequal outcomes for workers. Instead of passing on the benefits of better technologies to consumers through lower prices, these “superstar” companies leverage new technologies to charge even higher prices. The consequences are already immense, from unnecessarily high prices for virtually everything, to fewer startups that can compete, to rising inequality and stagnating wages for most workers, to severely limited social mobility. A provocative investigation into how market power hurts average working people, The Profit Paradox also offers concrete solutions for fixing the problem and restoring a healthy economy.