Decentralisation of bargaining and manufacturing employment: Sweden 1970-96

Anders Forslund () and Thomas Lindh

No 2004:3, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: Swedish unemployment was very low up to the early 1990s when it rose rapidly. At the same time manufacturing employment fell by more than 20 %. The decentralisation of wage bargaining that started in 1983 may have contributed to this by making employment more shock sensitive or by increasing wage mark-ups. In Swedish plant-level data for manufacturing 1970–96 relatively less employment is in low-productivity plants after decentralisation than before, but the correlation between industry wage costs and productivity becomes stronger. Our conclusion is that decentralisation of bargaining in Sweden has not allowed more low-productivity plants in manufacturing to survive. On the contrary, the evidence indicates that a higher wage mark-up may have resulted from the decentralisation. This would weed out low-productivity plants and decrease manufacturing employment.

Keywords: Manufacturing employment; bargaining institutions; industry structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J31 L60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2004-03-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2004/wp04-03.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2004/wp04-03.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2004/wp04-03.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:hhs:ifauwp:2004_003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).