Unemployment in Europe: Swimming against the Tide of Skill-Biased Technical Progress without Relative Wage Adjustment

The hypothesis that European unemployment is the rigid relative wage mirror-image of increased wage dispersion in the US is explored. The framework is a two sector –manufacturing and services- model with skilled and unskilled labor. A proxy for skill-biased technical progress (SBTP) is constructed from data on total factor productivity (TFP). Econometric analysis of the relationship between SBTP and aggregate unemployment shows that SBTP explains some 50% of the unemployment increase in major European countries since the early 1970s, but it does not explain US unemployment. The hypothesis is robust in that it is not rendered void by inclusion of alternative, mostly macroeconomic, explanatory variables.TBA

Public Ownership and Income Redistribution

The large differences among advanced OECD countries in the shares of workers that are employed by the government can probably only to a small part be explained by factors that are in the center of modern organization theory explanations for public vs. private ownership. This paper explores a new hypothesis for explaining the share of government employment. It is based on asymmetric information about individual worker productivity between the taxman, and workers and their employers. Hence, government employment opens up policy options, not available with only private production. The hypothesis is that government employment is an efficient element of redistribution policy. The mechanism is that the government can, through its employment policy, increase the relative scarcity in the private sector of the workers the government wants to redistribute in favor of. That increases their wages and lowers the need for redistribution through the tax- and transfer systems, which mitigates distortions. One can therefore expect large government employment in countries where the tolerance of inequality is low.Structure and Scope of Government; Optimal non-linear income taxation; public production; production efficiency

Why Do Scandinavian Governments Employ So Many and the United States Government So Few?

Is it a sheer coincidence that the egalitarian Scandinavian countries have significantly larger government employment shares than the much less egalitarian United States? A positive correlation between equality and government employment share in the OECD indicates that it is not a coincidence. We suggest a nonlinear relation between equality and government employment share. The reason is that significant redistribution creates labor supply distortions, which can be mitigated by government employment, which follows decision rules that are different from those in the private sector, and by large public production. This has potentially important implications for differences in wage dispersion and unemployment among OECD countries.government, public-sector employment, scope of government, redistribution, production efficiency