Le politiche salariali in una Unione Europea. Un'applicazione al caso italiano[Wage policies in a Monetary Union. An Application to the case of Italy]

Incomes policy started with the San Valentine's decree of 1984, which marks the beginning of the process that led to the abolishment of Scala Mobile and reached its peak with the Protocollo d'intesa of 1993. The work proposes to study by cointegration analysis the effects of incomes policy on the short and long run equilibrium between real wages, labour productivity and unemployment. The analysis is based on ISTAT data relative to 1951-'95. The Johansen procedure detects only one cointegrating vector. The Engle and Granger procedure applied to real wages detects a near unitary coefficient for labour productivity and a negative elasticity of unemployment. For the after-1984 period, the procedure detects a statistically significant change in the coefficient of labour productivity, but not of unemployment. In the short run, the abolition of Scala Mobile and the introduction of concertazione coincided with a negative coefficient of productivity growth, which confirms the loss of purchasing power of wages, implicit in the national agreements. Nevertheless, the coefficient of residuals in the second step increases in absolute value in the period under consideration, suggesting a faster return to the long run equilibrium value. The relationship between real wages and unemployment does not seem to change though.