Suchergebnisse

The GVAR is a Global Vector Auto-Regression model of the global economy. Its main feature is to take into account the financial and real linkages connecting the major world economies. This book provides an overview of the GVAR and its applications forecasting, finance issues, and regional studies.

"Productivity is an essential concept in almost every field related to Economics and Management. As Paul Krugman wrote in \The Age of Diminishing Expectations (1994)" \Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country's ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker." As we slowly exit { at the time of this writing { the nightmare of the 2020 COVID- 19 pandemic, enhancing productivity is even more critical. The crisis has battered global economic activity in an unprecedented way. Entire sectors have been forced to cease trading, and unemployment has risen to record levels. Governments, central banks and international organisations have responded promptly and massively to the shock, sheltering firrms and employees from its impact. This will, however, inevitably further slow aggregate productivity, at least in the short run. Thus, the debate on how to raise productivity is again in the headlines, and that is the subject of this book. We believe that any useful insight must be based on detailed granular information compiled at the level of the firm. To that end we will draw from research and the dataset produced by CompNet1, a large European research initiative that the authors founded a decade ago."

Productivity developments have been rather divergent across EU countries and particularly between Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and elsewhere in the continent (non-CEE). How is such phenomenon related to wage bargaining institutions? Star-ting from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) shock, we analyse whether the specific set-up of wage bargaining prevailing in non-CEE may have helped their respec- tive firms to sustain productivity in the aftermath of the crisis. To tackle the issue, we merge the CompNet dataset – of firm-level based productivity indicators – with the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) survey on wage bargaining institutions. We show that there is a substantial difference in the institutional set-up between the two above groups of countries. First, in CEE countries the bulk of the wage bargai-ning (some 60%) takes place outside collective bargaining schemes. Second, when a collective bargaining system is adopted in CEE countries, it is prevalently in the form of firm-level bargaining (i. e. the strongest form of decentralisation), while in non-CEE countries is mostly subject to multi-level bargaining (i. e. an intermediate regime, only moderately decentralised). On productivity impacts, we show that firms' TFP in the non-CEE region appears to have benefitted from the chosen form of decentralisation, while no such effects are detectable in CEE countries. On the channels of transmission, we show that decentralisation in non-CEE countries is also negatively correlated with dismissals and with unit labour costs, suggesting that such collective bargaining structure may have helped to better match workers with firms' needs.