Exploring regional wage dispersion in Swedish manufacturing, 1860–2009

Kristoffer Collin, Christer Lundh and Svante Prado

Scandinavian Economic History Review, 2019, vol. 67, issue 3, 249-268

Abstract: Economic theory predicts that regional wages will converge as transport and communication technologies bring labour markets together. An exploration of this transition from labour market segmentation to unification requires long-term evidence of nominal wages and cost of living by region. This paper presents new evidence of wages for male manufacturing workers and cost-of-living indices across 24 Swedish counties between 1860 and 2009. Our findings indicate that the Swedish regional wage differentials were a great deal larger in the 1860s than in the 2000s. Most of the compression took place between the 1860s and World War I, as well as in the 1930s and during World War II. Differences in expenditures on housing impact on our assessment of convergence in the post-World War II decades: the nominal measure declines, while the real one stays constant. Our concluding discussion engages with the assumption that before World War I, regional wage convergence was associated with labour mobility, spurred by improved communication and transportation technologies as well as by the implementation of modern employment contracts. In the 1930s and 1940s, in contrast, regional wage convergence can be traced to high unionisation and centralised collective bargaining in the labour market, two distinguishing features of the Swedish Model.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03585522.2018.1551242 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:sehrxx:v:67:y:2019:i:3:p:249-268

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/sehr20

DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2018.1551242

Access Statistics for this article

Scandinavian Economic History Review is currently edited by Espen Ekberg and Francisco Beltran Tapia

More articles in Scandinavian Economic History Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().