El mercado de trabajo espanol en la union monetaria. Flexibilidad de salarios y politica laboral

Esteban Sanroma () and Raul Ramos ()

No 45, Working Papers in Economics from Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia

Abstract: The low interregional labour mobility and the incapacity of the Community Budget to act as a stabilization tool imply that the Spanish labour market should have a high wage flexibility to react quickly in response to asymmetric shocks in the framework defined by the Monetary Union. In this paper, we study the rigidity of wages and its possible determinants using empirical evidence on wage rigidity for the OECD countries from the estimation of wage equations following a Phillips curve specification augmented with expectations. The obtained results permit to affirm that the Spanish labour market performs poorly with a high wage rigidity and as a result with a low capacity to react in response to recessive shocks. The analysis of the determinants of this high rigidity permits to obtain the following conclusions. First, a higher wage flexibility could be obtained through a coordinated and consensuated action of social and economic agents in the wage bargaining process. Second, active labour market policies, specially related to formation, or passive policies, like a decrease in the duration of unemployment subsidies, can also increase wage flexibility. And, third, a higher flexibility could be obtained moving to more centralized or decentralized wage bargaining systems.

JEL-codes: J50 F33 F15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
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