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Il documento presenta i risultati di una ricerca che si concentra sull’evoluzione della distribuzione funzionale del reddito e del costo del lavoro in Italia. In particolare, viene calcolata la quota salari aggiustata e il CLUP per il periodo 1970-2020 a partire da dati di contabilità nazionale (Istat). Oltre al totale dell'economia, il contributo fa riferimento all'andamento della quota salari in quattro macrosettori (il settore privato non agricolo ad esclusione dell’immobiliare, il manifatturiero, i servizi commerciali e professionali, i servizi finanziari e di rete). Tali andamenti vengono inoltre analizzati con riferimento alla dinamica del salario reale medio, della produttività del lavoro e dei prezzi relativi.

The paper enters the current debate at the intersection of comparative political economy and international trade on the role of price and non-price competitiveness in influencing export. Through an econometric exploration, we identify price competitiveness as a non-negligible factor in driving export, for a set of OECD countries from 1994 to 2019. The documented price sensitiveness, combined with the institutions and policies adopted to promote export-led growth, casts an unsettling light on the prospects for a recovery, particularly for the Euro area. These worrying conclusions are not, however, unescapable. The emergence of the export-led growth model - with its twin brother, the debt-led one - answered the demand-generating problems created by years of wage share decreases and a steady retreat of the State from its traditional demand management role. Drastically inverting these tendencies would contribute to strongly narrowing the need for export-led strategies.

During the last decades, mature economies have tended to experience a divergence between labour compensation and productivity growth. Interpretations of this trend are still under debate. Our article aims at contributing to a sound, evidence-based understanding. We estimate the magnitude of this decoupling for a panel of 22 high-income economies (1970–2018) and empirically assess the role of a variety of factors. After providing evidence that casts doubt on the impact of technical change, we adopt a ‘political economy’ standpoint and focus on the structural effects on real compensation growth of several macroeconomic and institutional dimensions. Our findings indicate that labour market slack and the weakening of pro-labour institutions have acted as important wage-squeezing factors. A negative effect is also found for trade openness and international capital mobility, while most financialization variables are not significant. The robustness of our results is supported by a range of tests and specifications.

Hysteresis is receiving renewed interest and empirical support but the mechanisms behind it need better understanding. As a novel contribution to such understanding we empirically assess the interpretation according to which long-term unemployment causes hysteresis by increasing the NAIRU. We analyse a panel of 25 OECD countries over a long time span along two lines of enquiry. First, we verify whether long-term unemployment is ‘reversible’. Second, we focus on episodes of strong long-term unemployment reduction to check for inflationary effects in the subsequent years. We find a strong association between total and long-term unemployment rates even in upswings, testifying to macroeconomic reversibility. We do not find accelerating or persistently higher inflation after episodes of strong decline in long-term unemployment, even when the economy is estimated to be above its potential. Our results cast doubt on this explanation of hysteresis and challenge the notion of NAIRU as an inflationary barrier.