Economic Adjustment, the Mining Sector and the Real Wage in Zambia

Dennis Chiwele

Chapter 11 in Constraints on the Success of Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa, 1996, pp 210-233 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Real wage flexibility is considered essential to a successful implementation of conventional IMF and World Bank programmes. And yet the two institutions have been pessimistic concerning the flexibility of real wages in the Third World. They attribute wage rigidity to institutional factors — workers’ demands for higher wages and governments’ liberality in responding to these demands (e.g. IBRD, 1981: 92–93). Thus, to help sustain the decline in the real wage induced by a devaluation, wage restraint measures tend to feature prominently in IMF and World Bank programmes. But the general decline in developing countries’ real wages in the 1980s, even in countries with a long tradition of ‘strong’ labour unions such as those in Latin America, raised questions as to whether the role of institutional factors in real wage determination had not been overstated.

Keywords: Capital Stock; Real Wage; Relative Price; Mining Sector; Economic Adjustment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-24373-0_11

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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-24373-0_11

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