A Critique of the Global Wage System

Gernot Köhler

Working Papers - Programa Teoría de las Relaciones Internacionales from Argentine Center of International Studies

Abstract: It is widely believed that international wage differences are a result of international productivity differences. That belief has been criticized by various economists. For example, Samir Amin observed: “Workers at the periphery are super-exploited . . . because the differential of wages (and incomes from non-wage labour in general) is much higher than the differential of productivities.” (Amin 1990, chapter 6) In the estimation of Prebisch, Singer, and Myrdal, “productivity increases that take place in developed nations are passed on to their workers in the form of higher wages and income, while most or all of the productivity increases that take place in developing nations are reflected in lower prices” (Salvatore 1987: 273) I would like to add a few observations of my own. My observations are influenced by the feminist critique of wages, which has established that wage differences between the sexes are frequently caused by discrimination, rather than by productivity differences. Following that line of reasoning, the thesis of this article is that international wage differences are, to a large extent, caused by discrimination, rather than by productivity differences.

Keywords: international wage differences; productivity; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.caei.com.ar/es/programas/teoria/14.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cis:teoria:014

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Argentine Center of International Studies, Cafayate 1031, CP: 1408, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers - Programa Teoría de las Relaciones Internacionales from Argentine Center of International Studies
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ariel González ().