Real wage and productivity stagnation

Stephen Machin

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The UK’s economic performance since the global financial crisis has seen real wage growth stagnating for over fifteen years and weak productivity growth with most, but not all, of the wage stagnation overlapping with the productivity slowdown. This paper studies these stagnation patterns in detail for the UK, and places them in international context where the country does not fare well as it both drops down wage and productivity growth rankings across countries. There has been a longer term decline in the influence of labour market institutions in affecting worker wages as the changing balance of power between workers and employers has played a role in the emerging wedge between wage and productivity growth in the stagnation period. The paper concludes with a policy related discussion of possible sources where sustained wage growth could re-emerge, and thereby generate improvements in living standards, in the future.

Keywords: real wage growth; productivity growth; employer and worker power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J38 J42 J51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2025-06-30
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 30, June, 2025, 41(1), pp. 105 - 119. ISSN: 0266-903X

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/127594/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:127594

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().