Abstract
The United Nations System of National Accounts (UN SNA) collects information on the compensation of employees and provides the unadjusted labor income share for 93 low- and middle-income countries with an average time span of 15.3 years per country. Since only about one third of developing countries report mixed income, the mixed-income adjusted labor income shares are computed for only 38 countries from this dataset. The adjusted labor share using the employment structure of a country is also calculated with ILO’s data of Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM), which produces estimates for 73 countries. The second group of data sets extend the coverage of data from UN SNA and KILM by including additional national data sources.
The authors are thankful to Juzhong Zhuang for many helpful comments and sharing the data for Figure 5.
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Notes
- 1.
MES holds prices of other factor inputs constant and adjusts the measure of the elasticity of substitution accordingly. MES can be expressed as a function of the own price and the cross-price elasticities of two inputs as \(MES_{ij} = \frac{{dlogx_{j} }}{{dlogp_{i} }} - \frac{{dlogx_{i} }}{{dlogp_{i} }}\), where \(p_{i}\) and \(p_{j}\)are the prices of inputs \(x_{i}\) and \(x_{j}\). Blackorby and Russell (1989) showed that changes in the ratio of factor income shares can be directly predicted by MES as \(\frac{{dlog\frac{{p_{i} x_{i} }}{{p_{j} x_{j} }}}}{{dlog\frac{{p_{i} }}{{p_{j} }}}} = 1 - MES_{ij}\).
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- 3.
1. Agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing (AGR); 2. Mining and quarrying (MIN); 3. Manufacturing (MAN); 4. Electricity, gas and water supply (PU); 5. Construction (CON); 6. Wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants (WRT); 7. Transport, storage, and communication (TRA); 8. Finance, insurance, real estate and business services (FIRE); 9. Government services (GOV); 10. Community, social and personal services (OTH).
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Fields, G., Paul, S. (2019). Previous Literature and New Findings. In: Fields, G., Paul, S. (eds) Labor Income Share in Asia. ADB Institute Series on Development Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7803-4_1
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