A spending-led economic recovery will soon rely on robust wage growth
December 30, 2020 10.30pm
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In his genial and occasionally subversive manner, finance journalist Alan Kohler recently shared a graph on social media that compared two periods of sharemarket gains. The graph showed that in the 30 years to 1988, 92 per cent of gains were derived from economic growth. But in the decades since then, the majority of sharemarket growth was produced by a “transfer from wages”. In simple terms, businesses have been making money by taking more of the economic pie from their workers rather than growing it.
The coronavirus pandemic has, if anything, exacerbated the trend with company profits jumping while workers’ total share of income has continued its steep decline.