Towards the Wage‐Earner State: A Comparative Study of Wage Shares 1948–75

The functional distribution of incomes is one of the classical subjects in economics. Even though one might argue that it is one of the least interesting among income distributions it is no doubt the one which has received most attention. In the present article, in the second and third sections, we survey the evidence concerning the wage‐ratio 1W and the factor‐wage‐ratio fW for 17 OECD countries from 1948 to 1975. Both have increased rather strikingly, especially in some of the smaller countries, and this raises a number of fairly deep questions. A few of these are discussed in the last two sections.