The Distributional Impact Of Labour Market Reforms

Spain’s structural reforms, implemented around 2012, have arguably contributed to a faster and stronger economic recovery. In particular, there is strong evidence that the 2012 labor market reforms increased wage flexibility, which helped the Spanish economy to regain competitiveness and create jobs. But the impact of these labor reforms on income inequality and social inclusion has not been analyzed much. This paper aims to shed light on this issue by employing an econometric decomposition procedure combined with the synthetic control method. The results indicate that the 2012 labor reforms have helped improve employment and income equality outcomes with no substantial impact on the overall risk of poverty. Nevertheless, the reforms appear to have induced a deterioration of average hours worked, in-work poverty, and possibly also of involuntary part-time employment.

This paper studies the effects of labour market reforms on the functional distribution of income in a DSGE model (Roeger et al., 2008) with skill differentiation, in which households supply three types of labour: low-, medium- and high-skilled. The households receive income from labour, tangible capital, intangible capital, financial wealth and transfers. We trace how structural reforms in the labour market affect these different types of income. The quantification of labour market reforms is based on changes in structural indicators that significantly reduce the gap of the EU average income towards the best-performing EU countries. We find a general trade-off between an increase in employment for a particular group and the income of the average group member relative to income per capita. Reforms that increase employment of lowand medium-skilled workers imply a trade-off between employment and wages in the low- and medium-skilled group, due to the increase in the skill-specific supply of labour. Capital owners generally benefit from labour market reforms, with an increasing share in total income. This can be attributed to limited entry into the final goods production sector, underlining the importance of product market reforms in addition to labour market reforms.

This paper studies the effects of structural reforms on the functional distribution of income in EU Member States. To study this mechanism we use a DSGE model (Roeger et al. 2008) with households supplying three types of labour, low-, medium- and high-skilled. We assume that households receive income from labour, tangible capital, intangible capital, financial wealth and transfers and we trace how structural reforms affect these types of incomes. The quantification of structural reforms is based on changes in structural indicators that can significantly close the gap of a country's average income towards the best performing countries in the EU. We find a general trade-off between an increase in employment of a particular group and the income of the average group member relative to income per capita. In general, reforms which aim at increasing employment of low skilled workers are associated with a fall in wages relative to income per capita. Capital owners generally benefit from labour market reforms, with an increasing share in total income, due to limited entry into the final goods production sector. This suggests that labour market re-forms may lead to suboptimal distributional effects if there are rigidities in goods markets present, a finding which confirms the importance of ensuring that such reforms are accompanied or preceded by product market reforms.

The authors find that reform of the Hukou system has the most significant impact on aggregate economic activity, as well as income distribution. Whereas the land market reform primarily benefits the agricultural households, this reform's primary beneficiaries are the rural households currently sending temporary migrants to the city. By reducing the implicit tax on temporary migrants, Hukou reform boosts their welfare and contributes to increased rural-urban migration. The combined effect of both factor market reforms is to reduce the urban-rural income ratio dramatically, from 2.59 in 2007 under the authors' baseline scenario to 2.27. When viewed as a combined policy package, along with WTO accession, rather than increasing inequality in China, the combined impact of product and factor market reforms significantly reduces rural-urban income inequality. This is an important outcome in an economy currently experiencing historic levels of rural-urban inequality"--Abstract.

This paper examines the short-term distributional effects of a number of tax and labour market reforms in the euro area, drawing on simulations using a micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium model. A heterogeneous household sector with two groups of consumers is considered. The first group maximises intertemporal utility over an infinite horizon in the presence of habit persistence. The second group is liquidity constrained and has no access to financial markets for intertemporal income transfers. It thus spends its disposable income entirely on current consumption. Although the examined reforms are estimated to boost aggregate consumption and output immediately after implementation, they have sizeable distributional effects. In particular, liquidity-constrained households may incur transitional losses after a cut in the benefit replacement ratio. Lowering employment and/or price adjustment costs could markedly reduce these short-term costs. A suitable compensation scheme could also reduce the uneven distribution of transitional losses, but at the expense of lower aggregate gains in the long run.

Addressing the poverty and distributional impacts of carbon pricing reforms is critical for the success of ambitious actions in the fight against climate change. This paper uses a simple framework to systematically review the channels through which carbon pricing can potentially affect poverty and inequality. It finds that the channels differ in important ways along several dimensions. The paper also identifies several key gaps in the current literature and discusses some considerations on how policy designs could take into account the attributes of the channels in mitigating the impacts of carbon pricing reforms on households.

Originally published in 2004. Growth, income distribution, and labour markets are issues of pivotal importance in the Latin American context. Examining unique theoretical issues and the empirical evidence, this book provides a critical analysis of the key elements of income distribution determinants, labour market functions, trade policies, and their interrelations. As the advance of globalization becomes seemingly unstoppable, this book provides an important reappraisal of the impact of this new phenomenon, and in particular, the pernicious impact it may have on income growth and distribution. The key objective of the volume is to integrate more fully the analysis of trade and labour market economists, in order to better understand the labour market and income distribution implications of globalization and international integration. Forty years after the early calls to appropriately investigate the micro foundations of macroeconomics, the separation of the two at the policy level is more damaging than ever before - particularly for developing regions; this volume therefore makes an important contribution at the theoretical and policy levels by bringing together macroeconomic and microeconomic analyses.

This paper summarizes statistics on the key aspects of the distribution of earnings levels and earnings changes using administrative (social security) data from Italy between 1985 and 2016. During the time covered by our data, earnings inequality and earnings volatility increased, while earnings mobility did not change significantly. We connect these trends with some salient facts about the Italian labor market, in particular the labor market reforms of the 1990s and 2000s which induced a substantial rise in fixedterm and part-time employment. The rise in parttime work explains much of the rise in earnings inequality, while the rise in fixed-term contracts explains much of the rise in volatility. Both these trends affect the earnings distribution through hours worked: part-time jobs reduce hours worked within a week, while fixed-term contracts reduce the number of weeks worked during the year as well as increase their volatility. We find weak evidence that fixed-term contracts represent a "stepping-stone" to permanent employment. Finally, we offer suggestive evidence that the labor market reforms contributed to the slowdown in labor productivity in Italy by delaying human capital accumulation (in the form of general and firm-specific experience) of recent cohorts.