Have jobs and wages stopped rising? Productivity and structural change in advanced countries

This paper is aimed at studying the long run relationship between GDP per capita growth and the job “required” by such a growth. This relationship, which has been positive for a long period after World War II, leading to a more equal and wealthy society via the labour market, turned out to be non-positive since the middle of the 1980s, giving rise to the so-called ”Jobless Growth” and “Jobless Recovery” phenomena. By analysing data from STAN databases throughout the period 1970–2015, we found that the break in the relation between GDP per capita growth and employment can be explained by the decoupling between productivity from one hand, and labour compensation and utilisation from the other. Our findings further suggest that different economic sectors specifically contributed to the productivity change in accordance with their technological and knowledge intensity.