productivity

Increasing demand is key to growth in advanced economies. And that means higher wages are necessary. But the redistribution of national income toward capital over the past generation has undermined the capacity of ordinary households to…

Productivity is an important yardstick for measuring the value of goods and services workers. A recent study by McKinsey demonstrates that wages and demand are key to raising it.

The abrupt spike in interest rates from mid-April to mid-May is very unlikely to be the beginning of something much bigger and much more likely to be the sort of occasional panic attack that Japan has seen so many of in recent years.

It’s currently very trendy in Italy to blame Angela Merkel, Mario Monti, and austerity measures for the current recession. This column argues that while the severity of the downturn is clearly a cyclical phenomenon, the inability of the…

In recent months, we have seen a precipitous drop in Chinese trade growth. This comes from both the export and the import side. What's happening? A large part of it is wages. As I indicated two years ago in a post on the Lewis Turning…

Nouriel Roubini writes that the current “muddle through” approach to the eurozone (EZ) crisis is not a stable disequilibrium; rather, it is an unstable disequilibrium. Either the member states move from this disequilibrium toward a broader…

In January Steven Hansen observed that, through November, the trade deficit for manufactured goods in 2010 was the equivalent of 1.3 million workers earning the median manufacturing wage in the U.S.