Raising South Africa's low employment rate to levels seen in emerging market or advanced economy peers could raise GDP per capita by 50 to 60 percent and reduce income inequality dramatically in the long term. By putting further strain on an already fragile labor market, Covid-19 has raised the...

The growth of Italian exports has lagged that of euro area peers. Against the backdrop of unit labor costs that have risen faster than those in euro area peers, this paper examines whether there is a competitiveness challenge in Italy and evaluates the framework of wage bargaining. Wages are set...

Since the global financial crisis, sector-level bargaining has come under renewed scrutiny. While in Southern Europe, the crisis raised concerns about the role of collective bargaining as an obstacle to labor market adjustment, in Northern Europe it was perceived more favourably and, according...

This paper investigates the implications of lowering formal regulations in labor and product markets on informality and macroeconomic outcomes in India. We estimate a DSGE model with an informal sector, and rigidities in the formal labor and product markets. Along with increasing GDP and...

In many countries, notably across Europe, collective bargaining coverage is enhanced by government-issued extensions that widen the reach of collective agreements beyond their signatory parties to all firms and workers in the same sector. This paper analyses the causal impact of such extensions...

The Spanish labor market is not working: the unemployment rate is structurally very high; wages are not very responsive to labor market conditions, causing a high cyclicality of unemployment; and the labor market is highly dual. Compared with the EU15, Spanish labor market institutions and...

The paper investigates the determinants of wages in the tradables and service sectors in Norway and Sweden. Tradables wages are determined by their own productivity growth whereas service sector wages are influenced by wage growth in the tradables sector. The traditional strong sensitivity of...

This paper addresses two questions. First, under what circumstances will a centralized wage-bargaining system offer higher output and employment than a decentralized system? Second, what is the relationship between the degree of wage centralization and inflation? The paper argues that...

The literature on the relationship between the unemployment rate and wage bargaining fails to separate the offsetting effects of a reduction in competition associated with centralized bargaining and the increased awareness of unemployment externalities. This paper uses OECD data to distinguish...