STRUCTURAL CHANGE, AGGREGATE DEMAND AND THE DECLINE OF LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Pasquale Tridico and Riccardo Pariboni

No 221, Departmental Working Papers of Economics - University 'Roma Tre' from Department of Economics - University Roma Tre

Abstract: Over the last three decades, many advanced economies have experienced significant changes in their productive structures, with a decline in the share of workers in manufacture and a transition towards the service sector. This structural change can be considered as one of the main causes behind the poor performance of aggregate labour productivity. Moreover, these changes have been associated with a process of reforms in the labour market - i.e. an increase in labour flexibility and a reduction in employees’ protections - and a compression of the wage share. Our hypothesis is that these institutional and economic processes can also be harmful to labour productivity. We submit our hypotheses to empirical scrutiny. The results are as follows: the share of employment in manufacture is positively related to labour productivity. On the other hand, the share of employment in several service industries and labour flexibility negatively affect it.

Keywords: Structural change; labour productivity; aggregate demand; welfare models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 H53 J23 L16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dipeco.uniroma3.it/db/docs/WP%20221.pdf (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:rtr:wpaper:0221

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers of Economics - University 'Roma Tre' from Department of Economics - University Roma Tre Via Silvio d'Amico 77, - 00145 Rome Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Telephone for information ().