Behind the Gap Between Productivity and Wage Growth

Dean Baker

CEPR Reports and Issue Briefs from Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)

Abstract: Much has been written in this business cycle regarding the rapid increases in productivity and the stagnant growth in wages. From the peak of the last business cycle in the first quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2006, productivity increased by 17.9 percent, an average growth rate of 3.2 percent per year. But real wages have barely moved, with the average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers increasing by just 1.2 percent, an average annual growth rate of just over 0.2 percent. This report explores the forces behind this difference. It looks at cyclical trends in labor and capital income, and the difference between gross and net productivity.

JEL-codes: E24 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/0702_productivity.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:epo:papers:2007-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Reports and Issue Briefs from Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().