Search results for:
Wages
Alan S. Blinder, World Economics, June 2009
Using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 US Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational codes, this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy/hard it is to offshore the work – either physically or electronically. Using this ranking, it is estimated that somewhere between 22% and 29% of all US jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two. (No estimate is made of how many jobs will actually be offshored.) Since the rankings are subjective, two alternatives are presented – one is entirely objective, the other is an independent subjective ranking. In general, they corroborate the rankings, albeit not perfectly. It is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation’s ‘offshorability’ and the skill level of its workers (as measured either by educational attainment or wages). However, it appears that, controlling for education, the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004.
Ralph Turvey, World Economics, September 2004
A monthly consumer price index traces changes in the monthly cost of a year’s
consumption using a sample of prices. But in some months the prices that can be
sampled will temporarily exclude some of the products that were bought in the
base year, Christmas trees providing a textbook example. Worse still, it becomes
permanently impossible to observe prices for sampled products that have been
completely superseded. There are methods for dealing with these two problems,
but they leave serious and irremediable defects in the index.
Mick Silver, World Economics, March 2003
The Retail Prices Index (RPI) is one of the UK’s most important macroeconomic
indicators, as well as being used for indexation/adjustments for inflation
to wages and benefits. This paper argues that the dynamic changes in product
markets and consumers’ responses to price changes need to be incorporated into
the RPI if it is to effectively measure changes in the cost of living. The quite
positive and innovative work undertaken by the Office for National Statistics
(ONS) is acknowledged. However, the basis of the RPI, in measuring the price
changes of a matched, fixed basket of goods, is considered inappropriate to
modern markets. Some proposals are made.
Displaying: 1-3 of 3