Wages, Profits, and Macroeconomic Adjustment: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The behavior of real wages has complicated macroeconomic policy in the industrialized world during the 1970s. Many commentators have discussed the extraordinary increase in wage inflation in Europe and Japan at the end of the last decade. Few have noted that the nominal wage gains resulted in remarkable increased in real wages. The five large economies outside North America in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had rapid growth of real hourly compensation in 1969-73, along with high rates of increase of nominal compensation. In most large OECD economies, real wages in the late 1960s grew faster than productivity, so that the distribution of income shifted toward labor, while the rate of return on capital was substantially reduced.