Rent-based income redistribution in developed market economies

Abstract

Public-sector workers in many countries earn more, on average, than their private-sector peers with similar characteristics. In terms of economic theory, these rewards represent economic rents most of which paid by a nation’s taxpayers. In contrast to economic rents accruing to recipients at the top of income distribution, most of these payments flow from one group of workers to another. For this reason, we call these payments “horizontal” economic rents. The level of horizontal rents is analyzed in this paper for 28 OECD countries, mostly representing Europe, based on public-private sector pay gap data from a number of studies. We found that measured as a ratio of public-sector overpayments to GDP, the highest horizontal rents are paid to government workers in Mediterranean EU countries. These rents are relatively low in larger EU countries, such as Germany and the United Kingdom and negative in Scandinavian countries, possibly reflecting the recognition of the non-monetary benefits of public employment, such as job security. Analyzing the determinants of horizontal rents, we found that their levels are lower in countries with stronger trade unions, as measured by trade-unions density and higher in countries with larger foreign-born populations. Macroeconomic variables, including GDP per capita, trade openness, labor force participation and government indebtedness were found to not measurably influence the level of horizontal rents. Further research is seen to be connected with a wider range of the countries under analysis, including the developing countries, and the other groups of employees with the horizontal economic rent, as well as the possible ways to decrease or to invalidate it as regards the practices analysis of the countries with the negligible or negative rent such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, and Iceland.