| Abstract: | The ‘wage space’, which is defined as the sum of price inflation and labour productivity growth, has played a major role as an indicator of allowable wage increases in the post-war wage negotiations in the Netherlands. This paper shows that: (a) wages and the wage space are co-integrated; (b) the deviation between wages and the wage space may act as an error correction term in the wage equation when both variables are identified as I(2); and (c) political consensus and the threat of labour conflicts (rather than actual strike activity) may be identified as the ‘mechanism’ behind this error correction in the wage equation. |
