SHARE OF LABOUR COMPENSATION AND AGGREGATE DEMAND – DISCUSSIONS TOWARDS A GROWTH STRATEGY

Economic growth strategies of developing countries have focused in the last decades on expanding their exports. In that scheme, wage compression seems necessary in order to compensate the observed slow productivity pace achieving, therefore, “competitiveness”. The core of this discussion is, undoubtedly, how the national product is appropriated through wages and surplus, i.e. the factorial income distribution. From that viewpoint, this paper discusses the long-term impoverishment of Argentinean workers through two key aspects of the economic process: on one hand, the way in which labour force is allocated, by analysing the relationship between real wage and productivity. On the other, how income is used in the acquisition of consumer goods and capital formation. In order to fully comprehend those trends, this paper recourses to an international comparison with two types of countries: the developed ones (United States of America, France and Japan) and the largest Latin American economies (Brazil and Mexico). As these processes take place in the long run, this paper’s analysis period will start from the 1950s.