Producción de la riqueza social y su distribución : Productividad y salarios en Argentina: Medio siglo en perspectiva latinoamericana e internacional

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the trends experienced by the Argentinean economy in the last decades through the factorial distribution of income and its determinants: real wage and productivity. In the last decades, Argentina has suffered a decline in the "wage share" due to the rise in productivity but mainly because of a fall in real wages. Through an international comparison we conclude that Brazil and Mexico show similar trends to those encountered for Argentina. However, these countries are quite different from the "developed" ones, where productivity and wages have grown constantly, even though the last one slowed down its pace since the 1970s. From those facts we conclude that the fall in real wages in Argentina is not exclusively the result of political processes adverse to workers. Otherwise, it is also related to a slow by extraordinary sources of surplus. One of those is the decline in real wages