بیکاری و رشد درونی با تکمیل مهارت در فن آوری های نوین

Models developed by recent economic literature do not manage to account simultaneously for the three main stylized facts observed in many EU countries since the mid-seventies: (i) the increase in the overall unemployment rates, particularly in that of low-skilled workers; (ii) the stability of relative wages; (iii) the deceleration in per capita output growth rates. This paper focuses on these issues. We construct an endogenous growth intertemporal general equilibrium model with two types of jobs and two types of workers. We allow for job competition between high- and low-skilled workers on the low-skilled segment of the labor market and for on-the-job search for high-skilled workers. Matching processes are represented by matching functions à la Pissarides. Workers search intensities are endogenous. We distinguish between embodied and disembodied technological progress and endogenize them through a learning-by-doing process based on capital accumulation. Biased technological change is introduced via embodied technical progress and new technologies–skill complementarity relationship. When simulated the model provides satisfactory results in reproducing the observed stylized facts.

Over the last 25 years the economic evolution of most European economies has been characterized by three facts. First, there has been a rise in unemployment rates, particularly in that of low-skilled workers. Second, this increase in unemployment has been accompanied by a rigidity in relative wages (see Table 1). And third, after the first oil shock, there has been a deceleration in the growth rate of per capita output and in the growth rate of total factor productivity (productivity slowdown puzzle) (see Table 2). Table 1. Low-skilled unemployment rates (difference with respect to average unemployment rates) and relative wages in five OECD countries (in percent) Low-skilled unemployment rates (difference with respect to average unemployment rate) Relative wages 1970–1979 1980–1989 1990–1999 1980–1984 1985–1989 1990–1995 Belgium 0.7 2.7 6.2 D1 / D5 .. 71.6 71.8 France 1.6 8.5 11.3 D1 / D5 61.1 61.9 62.0 Germany 2.7 7.2 7.8 D1 / D5 68.0 70.7 72.9 United Kingdom 1.4 7.4 6.5 D1 / D5 63.1 59.6 57.4 United States 2.5 3.4 5.1 D1 / D5 51.5 48.7 48.5 D1 / D5: ratio of the upper earnings limit of the first decile of workers to the upper limit of the fifth decile. Source concerning unemployment rates: Sneessens and Shadman (2000) for Belgium; Fonseca et al. (1998) for France; Buttler and Tessaring (1993) for Germany; Nickell and Quintini (2001) for the United Kingdom (only male workers); Bureau of Labor Statistics database for the United States. Source concerning relative wages: OECD Employment Outlook 1996 chapter 3. For Belgium we have information only between 1985–1993 and for Germany between 1983 and 1993. Table options Table 2. Average growth rates of per capita output, 1950–1987, 1990–2000 (percent) 1950–1973 1973–1987 1990–2000 France 4.0 1.8 1.4 Germany 4.9 2.1 1.3 Japan 8.0 3.1 1.1 United Kingdom 2.5 1.8 1.9 United States 2.2 1.6 2.2 Source: The two first columns are constructed from Tables 3.3, 3.5, 5.3, 5.4 and 5.19 in Maddison (1991). The last column corresponds to OECD Economic Outlook No. 70. Table options Even if unemployment and growth problems often arise together, the literature has traditionally treated them separately. Models of economic growth typically assume full employment and models dealing with employment assume no growth. Since the beginning of the nineties there is, however, an emerging literature introducing growth into matching and search models of unemployment or matching and search frictions into growth models. Pissarides (2000), analyzes the relationship between growth and unemployment in the presence of embodied and disembodied exogenous technical change. Bean and Pissarides (1993) build a simple OLG endogenous growth model with matching frictions. Merz (1995) captures many of the stylized facts observed in the U.S. labor market using a Real Business Cycle (RBC) model with search frictions and exogenous labor augmenting technological progress. Postel-Vinay (2002) develops a Schumpeterian model to analyze the short- and long-run responses of unemployment to exogenous changes in the rate of technological progress. Postel-Vinay (1998) goes a step further and studies the transitional dynamics of the well known Pissarides (2000) search model in an endogenous growth framework à la Romer (1986). Finally, the growth–unemployment relationship is considered in an efficiency–wage model framework by Brecher et al. (2002) and in a generalized augmented Solow type model by Bräuninger and Pannenberg (2002). This paper constitutes an attempt to deal simultaneously with the observed stylized facts about unemployment, wages and growth in European economies. Our main contribution consists thus in taking into account both European labor market and growth issues in a dynamic setup which is inspired from the RBC tradition. However, contrarily to Merz (1995), where growth arises from an exogenous labor augmenting technological progress, in our framework growth is endogenous. Even if RBC models do not provide analytical solutions they do well in capturing most of the stylized facts that are known about the behavior of aggregate variables.1 Therefore their use is appropriate in our context where we try to understand the evolutions of European economies. On what concerns the labor market, the paper provides a very complete representation characterized by the presence of matching frictions and a double heterogeneity as in Gautier (2002): heterogeneity of jobs (simple vs. complex) and heterogeneity of workers (high- and low-skilled). We allow for job competition between high- and low-skilled workers on the low-skilled (simple) segment of the labor market and for on-the-job search for high-skilled workers. Moreover, search intensities of high- and low-skilled workers are endogenous, which permits to capture the discouragement effect (understood as a decrease in the intensity of search) suffered by low-skilled workers over the past decades. Regarding growth, the economic literature distinguishes at least between three types of endogenous growth models using technological innovation as the engine of growth. On the one hand, we have the models in which technological progress shows up as an expansion of the number of varieties of producer and consumer products (see Romer, 1987 and Romer, 1990). On the other hand, we have the “creative destruction” models, in which growth arises from improvements in the quality of products (see Aghion and Howitt, 1992). Finally, the learning-by-doing (LBD) models introduced in Romer (1986) assume that a firm that increases its physical capital learns simultaneously how to produce more efficiently (positive effect of experience on productivity). The three types of theoretical setups have as a common point the absence of decreasing returns to scale. They uniquely differ in the way they model technological innovation. In this paper we choose LBD as an engine of growth. As in Boucekkine et al. (2003) we distinguish between embodied and disembodied technological progress2 and endogenize them through a LBD process based on capital accumulation3 (the more capital cumulates the more the economy is able to innovate). Social returns to capital are then imposed to be constant so that a balanced growth path arises. The productivity slowdown is explained by a technological reassignment effect, according to which, after the first oil shock, the upturn in embodied technological progress crowded-out the disembodied technical one. This induced, on the one hand, an acceleration in the pace at which the already existing capital stock became obsolete4 (embodied technological progress only affects new investment goods), increasing the usage cost of capital and slowing down output growth. On the other hand, the empirical evidence suggests that the increased presence of embodied technological progress has been associated to a larger demand for high-skilled workers (see Berman et al., 1994, Machin et al., 1998, Krusell et al., 2000 and Caroli and Van Reenen, 2001). This new technologies–skill complementarity relationship is also represented by our theoretical setup. The model is calibrated on the basis of Belgian data and simulated to test its ability to capture the interactions between labor market variables and the economic growth behaviors. It constitutes the first attempt to deal simultaneously in a dynamic setup with the three stylized facts that have characterized the evolution unemployment, wages and growth in most European countries over the last decades. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we present the model. We describe the two forms of endogenous technological progress and determine the presence of a balanced growth path. Finally we describe labor market flows, the behavior of agents in the model and the wage bargaining process. In Section 3 we calibrate this theoretical setup on Belgian data for 1996. The properties of the model are examined by simulating its responses to various types of shocks. Section 4 concludes.

Over the past decades, particularly after the first oil shock, most European economies have been characterized by the increase in unemployment rates, the stability in relative wages and the decrease in the output growth rates (productivity slowdown). Even if these stylized facts have arisen together, most of the existing literature has treated them separately. This paper constitutes an attempt to deal simultaneously in a dynamic setup with the observed stylized facts about unemployment, wages and growth in European economies. We build an intertemporal general equilibrium model with endogenous growth and search frictions in the labor market. We also introduce an endogenous new technologies–skill complementary relationship and endogenous search intensities for all workers. When calibrated, the model manages to reproduce not only the labor market behaviors observed in Belgium between 1976 and 1996 but also the evolution in growth rates. We also evaluate the important contribution of the endogenous discouragement effect to the predicting ability of the model and we finish analyzing the effects of various policy measures.