Power over Profits

Adam Dean

Politics & Society, 2015, vol. 43, issue 3, 333-360

Abstract: Contemporary political economy debates tend to assume that an increase in productivity automatically leads to an equal increase in workers’ wages. This assumption shapes the way that many scholars think about economic globalization, as well as domestic policy reforms. This assumption is particularly widespread in the field of international political economy, where it is implicitly incorporated through the use of neoclassical economic models. Rather than explore the distributional struggle between capital and labor, these models use the assumption of full employment to predict that policies that increases worker productivity automatically leads to an equal increase in workers’ wages. In contrast, this article argues that the degree to which wages increase along with productivity depends on the domestic institutions that protect workers’ rights to act collectively. This article tests the relationship between worker productivity and wages by analyzing data from twenty-eight manufacturing industries, in 117 countries, from 1986 to 2002. The results demonstrate that the degree to which an increase in worker productivity leads to an increase in wages depends on a country’s level of protection for labor rights.

Keywords: International political economy; labor; international trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329215584788 (text/html)

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:sae:polsoc:v:43:y:2015:i:3:p:333-360

DOI: 10.1177/0032329215584788

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().