Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/144366 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
NBB Working Paper No. 154
Publisher: 
National Bank of Belgium, Brussels
Abstract: 
This paper presents information on wage-bargaining institutions, collected for 23 European countries, plus the US and Japan using a standardised questionnaire. Our data provide information from the years 1995 and 2006, for four sectors of activity and the aggregate economy. The main findings include a high degree of regulation in wage-setting in most countries. Although union membership is limited in many of them, union coverage is high and almost all countries also have some form of national minimum wage. Most countries negotiate wages on several levels, the sectoral level still being the most dominant, with an increasingly important role for bargaining at the individual firm level. The average length of collective bargaining agreements is found to lie between one and three years. Most agreements are strongly driven by developments in prices and eleven of the countries surveyed have some form of indexation mechanism which affects wages. Cluster analysis identifies three country groupings of wage-setting institutions
Subjects: 
wage bargaining
institutions
indexation
coverage
trade union membership
contract length
JEL: 
J31
J38
J51
J58
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
668.13 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.