By Mai Chi Dao, Mitali Das, Zsoka Koczan, and Weicheng Lian
Versions in عربي (Arabic), Русский (Russian), and Español (Spanish)
After being largely stable in many countries for decades, the share of national income paid to workers has been falling since the 1980s. Chapter 3 of the April 2017 World Economic Outlook finds that this trend is driven by rapid progress in technology and global integration.
Labor’s share of income declines when wages grow more slowly than productivity, or the amount of output per hour of work. The result is that a growing fraction of productivity gains has been going to capital. And since capital tends to be concentrated in the upper ends of the income distribution, falling labor income shares are likely to raise income inequality.
Trending down
In advanced economies, labor income shares began trending down in the 1980s. They reached their lowest level of the past half century just prior to the global financial crisis of 2008, and have not recovered materially since. Labor income shares now are almost 4 percentage points lower than they were in 1970.
Despite more limited data, labor shares have also declined in emerging market and developing economies since the early 1990s. This is especially the case for the larger economies in this group.