آیا باید انتخاب کنیم؟ بیکاری اروپا، نابرابری آمریکا و تاثیر آموزش و پرورش و بازار کار موسسات

In the last 15 years, two equilibria have arisen in the advanced world. On the one hand, wage dispersion has widened in those countries where unemployment has remained low (with cyclical variations). On the other hand, wherever income inequality has remained unchanged, unemployment has shot upwards. To account for these distinct patterns, we develop a political–economic model showing that, controlling for the skills of the population, the effects of technological and trade shocks (that have affected OECD nations) that are contingent on the institutional rules in place. Economies with generous unemployment allowances adjust through subsidized unemployment. By contrast, low levels of social protection lead to less unemployment but wider wage dispersion. The level of qualifications of the labor force determines the extent of the adjustment for a given institutional arrangement. We derive, in turn, the institutional structure of each country from the political conditions in place at the time of the shock. The empirical part successfully tests the model for the sample of European regions and US states.

Since the mid-1970s, most advanced nations have moved toward two distinct economic equilibria. In continental Europe, unemployment has followed a steady upward trend, encompassing, by the early 1990s, nearly 10% of the labor force. Meanwhile, in the US, the unemployment rate, although subject to substantial fluctuations, has remained close to its postwar level of 5% (see Table 1). These different trajectories in the labor market have been associated with distinct patterns in the evolution of wage distribution. As shown in Table 2, which reproduces the evolution during the last decade of the ratio between the wage earned by a male worker in the ninth decile and the wage earned by a male worker in the first decile in several OECD countries, in countries where unemployment rates have remained low (or highly cyclical), wage dispersion has risen — the US, UK, and Japan. By contrast, in countries suffering from increasingly sticky unemployment, wage inequality has remained unchanged or has even declined — France, Germany, and Italy.

During the last 20 years, unemployment has steadily increased in most advanced countries. Yet, contrary to what happened in the 1930s, it has hardly led to any higher level of poverty. Meanwhile, in those few cases where unemployment has fluctuated, following the business cycle, around a relatively stable mean, inequality has increased rather dramatically. Positing that both phenomena, unemployment and the domestic wage structure, are tightly related, this paper has developed a stylized model that combines strictly economic as well as broadly construed institutional variables. Once an economy is hit by a shock or set of shocks such as increased trade or technological change, the new level of unemployment as well as the structure of wage dispersion depend both on the skill distribution of the country's labor force and on the institutional arrangements in place.