Race to the Bottom: Low Productivity, Market Power, and Lagging Wages

Lance Taylor and Ozlem Omer ()

No 80, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: `Dualism` in the structure of production across sectors of the US economy, employment by sector, productivity levels and growth, real wages, and intersectoral terms-of trade increased markedly between 1990 and 2016. The discussion focuses on 16 sectors. Seven were `stagnant` - construction, education and health, other services, entertainment, accommodation and food, business services, and transportation and warehousing. They had low productivity levels, productivity growth rates hovering around zero, and low real wages. Their share of total employment rose from 47% in 1990 to 61% in 2016. The other `dynamic` sectors had higher and positively growing productivity while the terms-of- trade shifted against them. This bifurcation between industries is discussed in terms of a simple model. Increasing duality and secular stagnation are distinct possibilities.

Keywords: economic dualism; industrial structure; productivity; low wages; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D33 E12 E2 E24 J40 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2018-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Lance-Taylor-Race-to-Bottom.pdf (application/pdf)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3258219 First version, 2018 (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Race to the Bottom: Low Productivity, Market Power, and Lagging Wages (2019)
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:thk:wpaper:80

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3258219

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pia Malaney ().