Has The National Minimum Wage Reduced UK Wage Inequality?

This paper investigates the impact on the wage distribution of the introduction, in April 1999, of the National Minimum Wage in the UK. Because of the structure of UK earnings statistics, it is not straightforward to investigate this and a number of different methods for adjusting the published statistics are discussed. The main conclusions are that the NMW does have a detectable effect on the wage distribution and that compliance with the NMW is widespread but the impact is limited because the NMW has been set at a level such that only 6-7% of workers are directly affected and the NMW has had virtually no impact on the pay of workers not directly affected. Furthermore, virtually all the changes occurred within two months of the introduction in April 1999 and its impact declined over time from April 1999 to May 2001 as the minimum wage was not up-rated in line with the increase in average earnings.minimum wage, wage inequality

The Impact of the National Minimum Wage on the Wage Distribution in a Low-Wage Sector

The National Minimum Wage (NMW) that was introduced in April 1999 is sometimes paraded as evidence of the Blair government s commitment to reversing the rise in inequality that was characteristic of the last 25 years.

Estimating the Effect of Minimum Wages on Employment from the Distribution of Wages: A Critical View

In two papers, Meyer and Wise (1983a,b) present an ingenious method for estimating the effect of minimum wage rates on wages and employment using data based only on the observed cross-sectional distribution of wages. They, and others who have used this method, have generally found that the minimum wage causes substantial losses in employment. In this paper we evaluate the robustness of this technique. We argue that the estimates, at least for the UK, are very sensitive to the functional form assumed for the distribution of wages and to the assumption made about how far up the wage distribution the minimum wage has spillover effects.

Aid as a second-best solution: Seven problems of effectiveness and how to tackle them

Most rich countries developed without aid, and this 'self-development' has some intrinsic advantages. In today's massively unequal world, however, such an approach would imply very low levels of human development for several generations for many poor countries. Aid can therefore usefully be thought of as a necessary but 'second-best option'. The challenge then is how to manage this second-best option, particularly in the more aid-dependent states and the more fragile environments, in order to achieve sustainable results. The study examines seven problems that can limit the effectiveness of aid, and suggests possible ways of tackling them

The Effects of Minimum Wages on Employment: Theory and Evidence from the US

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to allow minimum wages to have the conventional negative impact on employment, but which also allows for the possibility of a neutral or a positive effect. The model structure is based on labour market frictions which give employers some degree of monopsony power. The formulated model has a number of empirical implications which we go on to test using data on industry-based minimum wages set by the UK Wages Councils between 1975 and 1990. Some strong results emerge: minimum wages significantly compress the distribution of earnings and, contrary to conventional economic wisdom but in line with several recent studies, do not have a negative impact on employment. If anything, the relationship between minimum wages and employment is estimated to be positive.

The DAC as a central actor in development policy issues: experiences over the past four years

Es wäre attraktiv zu denken, so der Verfasser, dass wir uns einer Situation nähern, in der die offizielle Hilfe für die Entwicklungsländer nicht mehr gebraucht wird. Das ist aber nicht der Fall. Die Unterstützung von offiziellen Quellen wird weiterhin gebraucht, um ärmeren Ländern zu helfen, die kolossalen Probleme von Armut, Arbeitslosigkeit, Mängeln des Gesundheits- und Bildungswesens sowie der unzulänglichen Infrastruktur, zusammen mit ökologischen Herausforderungen jeder Art, zu lösen. Das Development Assistance Committee (DAC) basiert auf der Hypothese, dass die Sponsoren die Effizienz ihrer Aktivitäten erhöhen können, indem sie zusammen arbeiten und lernen. Eine realistische Betrachtungsweise impliziert die Anerkennung der Tatsache, dass die Sponsoren unabhängige Akteure sind. Es soll keine Gleichförmigkeit ihrer Aktivitäten erwartet werden. Vielfalt, innerhalb und jenseits des DAC, ist wertvoll. Aber wenn eine weniger geteilte Welt zu den Zielvorstellungen der Entwicklung gehört, ist eine solche lernende Zusammenarbeit erforderlich. Der DAC muss sich, möglicherweise ganz radikal, an die sich verändernde Realität in der Welt anpassen. Aber dies bedarf eines gemeinsamen Lernens, einer gemeinsamen Reflexion und einer Kooperation aller Beteiligten. (ICF2

Improved Semantic Representations From Tree-Structured Long Short-Term Memory Networks

Because of their superior ability to preserve sequence information over time, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, a type of recurrent neural network with a more complex computational unit, have obtained strong results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. The only underlying LSTM structure that has been explored so far is a linear chain. However, natural language exhibits syntactic properties that would naturally combine words to phrases. We introduce the Tree-LSTM, a generalization of LSTMs to tree-structured network topologies. Tree-LSTMs outperform all existing systems and strong LSTM baselines on two tasks: predicting the semantic relatedness of two sentences (SemEval 2014, Task 1) and sentiment classification (Stanford Sentiment Treebank).Comment: Accepted for publication at ACL 201