Progressive policies for wage-led growth in EuropeOzlem Onaran and Engelbert Stockhammer No 15527, Greenwich Papers in Political Economy from University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre Abstract: Results of two new projects for FEPS and TASC by Onaran and Obst (2015) and Stockhammer and Wildauer (2015) show that the decline in the wage share was associated with a weaker and more volatile growth performance in the EU as a whole as well as in the vast majority of countries including the UK and Germany; this is what we call a wage-led demand regime. Stimulating wages in the EU would not only improve economic performance but would also help tackle unsustainable growth that is either driven by debt or by an excessive reliance on exports. While a higher wage policy can be implemented in a large single country with a large domestic market such as the UK or Germany, the impact would be stronger if coordinated at the European level. This finding has significant policy implications ahead of the EU referendum in the UK: the UK should see the EU membership as an opportunity and lead high road labour market policies in the EU as opposed to its current position of promoting low road policies, and use every chance to improve the cooperation among the pro-labour forces. Keywords: Wage share; growth; Europe; UK referendum (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gpe:wpaper:15527 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Greenwich Papers in Political Economy from University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre Contact information at EDIRC. |
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