اتحادیه و رضایت شغلی

We introduce reported job satisfaction as a measure of economic performance and find it positively correlated with GDP per capita and the labor force participation rate in a sample of OECD countries and negatively correlated with unemployment. Moreover, we find that many measures of corporatism, which we define in the wider sense as institutions that hamper with the allocation of the factors of production and the distribution of income in a capitalist economy, are negatively correlated across countries with job satisfaction. Thus job satisfaction is positively correlated across countries with measures of the protection of property rights and negatively correlated with the volume of regulations of credit markets, labor markets and businesses, in addition to barriers to entrepreneurship, corruption and lack of access to capital. In contrast, measures of capitalism, such as the number of listed companies and market capitalization, are positively correlated with job satisfaction.

In this paper we propose job satisfaction as a measure of economic performance and relate it to a variety of social institutions that fall under corporatism and capitalism. We are interested in testing to what extent capitalist institutions may enhance job satisfaction and economic performance while corporatist institutions that hamper with the allocation of resources and income may act to lower performance. We will test to see whether some signature features of corporatist and modern-capitalist economies – features such as the high employment protection in a country and the collective bargaining favored by corporatism; the large public sector; the bureaucratic red tape; and the individual freedoms relied on by capitalism – are conducive or inimical to job satisfaction. Our thesis is that capitalist systems may provide a better opportunity for individuals and firms with new ideas to replace existing ones, for new firms to leapfrog existing ones and for individuals with ideas to prosper while the corporatist system has a stifling effect by protecting vested interests in the form of jobs, businesses and industries. Our thesis that the institutions of corporatism may have a detrimental effect on economic performance is closely related to the contributions of Thrainn Eggertsson (such as Eggertsson, 2005), whose work we celebrate in this symposium. In his work, he describes how productivity depends not only on physical technology but also on social institutions that provide people with incentives. The set of possible institutions in society is then determined by technology in the narrow sense and also social knowledge and social technologies, as well as factors such as geography and natural resources. In Eggertsson’s work, societies do not always end up choosing the best institutions from the set of feasible institutions. There are forces that intervene and prevent societies from optimizing; forces such as the failure of collective action, the narrow self-interest of ruling groups, beliefs, values and cognitive limitations. In our case the belief in the beneficial effects of corporatist institutions and the vested interests of many social groups in maintaining this system may have affected overall job satisfaction in society and economic performance. The structure of this paper is as follows. We first discuss corporatism as an economic system, then review the literature on job satisfaction and take a preliminary look at the statistical relationship between job satisfaction and the conventional measures of economic performance; output per capita, labor force participation and unemployment, in a sample of 27 countries. We then introduce and discuss different types of corporatist institutions that are used in our analysis of the data. The data analysis starts with a series of scatter plots and tables that report statistical relationships between job satisfaction and various institutional variables. We also estimate principal components in order to explore the relationship between job satisfaction and institutions further. In order to test for robustness we also use data on 47 thousand individuals where we can control for individual attributes that may affect job satisfaction in addition to our institutional variables. The final section concludes.

Reported job satisfaction is correlated with observable measures of economic performance, such as labor market participation, unemployment and output per capita across the OECD countries. Job satisfaction may therefore not only be important for life satisfaction but also for employment and economic output. Many institutions of corporatism tend to hamper job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is positively correlated with the Fraser Institute measure of the legal structure (protection of property rights) and negatively with the volume of regulation of credit markets, labor markets and businesses. These regulations go beyond what would be needed to facilitate the smooth workings of the market economy, such as macro- and micro-prudential regulations in credit markets and the regulation of food production in goods markets. Moreover, job satisfaction is negatively related to barriers to entrepreneurship, corruption and with limited access to capital. The number of listed companies and market capitalization are positively correlated with job satisfaction. Overall, we conclude that many of the institutions we have labeled as corporatist may hamper economic performance and job satisfaction. Societies may have, to use the terminology of Thrainn Eggertsson, picked a set of institutions from the set of feasible institutions that fail to maximize economic performance.