This paper documents the downward trend in the labor share of global income since the early 1990s, as well as its heterogeneous evolution across countries, industries and worker skill groups, using a newly assembled dataset, and analyzes the drivers behind it. Technological progress, along with varying exposure to routine occupations, explains about half the overall decline in advanced economies, with a larger negative impact on middle-skilled workers. In emerging markets, the labor share evolution is explained predominantly by global integration, particularly the expansion of global value chains that contributed to raising the overall capital intensity in production.

This is an update of OECD 2006 "Understanding National Accounts". It contains new data, new chapters and is adapted to the new systems of national accounts, SNA 2008 and ESA 2010.

This book is about labor income share, which measures the share of national income paid in wages. The global share of income going towards labor is declining, which suggests a more unequal distribution of income. This has sparked debates about fair distribution of personal incomes among academics and policymakers alike. This book joins the discussion by bringing together recent developments in theoretical and empirical research on labor income share and novel insights on the measurement of the labor income share. The aim of this book is to help design policies to reduce inequality and provide useful knowledge to academics, policymakers from government agencies, policy aides in research institutions and think tanks, and broader audiences from public and private organizations.

This volume seeks to go beyond the microeconomic view of wages as a cost having negative consequences on a given firm, to consider the positive macroeconomic dynamics associated with wages as a major component of aggregate demand.

This book analyzes the decrease in labor share in China, which is a ratio of national income distribution to capital at three different levels (macro, meso, and micro) and from three different perspectives (growth, transition and opening up). The worsening income distribution has been a key issue for both Chinese and global economies in recent decades. The book shows that the decrease in labor share is closely related to economic growth, increasing extent of globalization, and firms with heterogeneous characteristics. Moreover, the book explains income inequality in detail, focusing on China’s increasingly important and emerging economy.

This report presents a comprehensive overview of recent and longer-term trends in productivity levels and growth in OECD countries, accession countries, key partners and some G20 countries.