The Unassuming Economist

In a recent column (2021) for Project Syndicate, Professor Dani Rodrik (Harvard Kennedy School of Government) writes that strengthening workers’ bargaining power and increasing the supply of good jobs for those who most need them is the way for boosting workers’ incomes and ensuring a fairer share of the prosperity pie for them.

“In advanced economies, earnings for those with less education often stagnated despite gains in overall labor productivity. In developing countries, where standard economic theory predicted that workers would be the main beneficiary of the expanding global division of labor, corporations, and capital again reaped the biggest gains.”

The article then moves on to discuss strategies that can counteract this problem such as firms’ investment in the happiness and productivity of their workers, increasing organizational power of workers, expansionary macroeconomic policies that can generate derived demand for labor, etc.

Click here to read the full article.