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“Why Is Labor Receiving a Smaller Share of Global Income? Theory and Empirical Evidence”
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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.
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“Dao et al. (2017) point to a decline in the labor share between 1991 and 2014 in 29 large countries that account for about two-thirds of world GDP in 2014.”
From The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms* (2020) · cites this paper as Dao et al. (2017)
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Metadata
- Authors
- Dao, M., Das, M., Koczan, Z., & Lian, W.
- Affiliations
- International Monetary Fund (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- IMF Working Papers
- Publisher
- International Monetary Fund (IMF)
- Published
- 2017-07
- Volume
- 2017
- Issue
- 169
- Pages
- 1
- ISSN
- 1018-5941 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3135665698
- Cited by
- 144
- References
- 95
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 47 · 2020: 21 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 19.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- IMF Working Paper (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › General Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economic Theory and Policy
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Economic Growth and Productivity
- Keywords
- wage share, declining labor share, technological progress, routine occupations, middle-skilled workers, global value chains, global integration, capital intensity, emerging markets, developed countries, skill heterogeneity
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