Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

It is actually quite complicated. It is true in many countries but it is not true in every country. The level and the trend in labour shares differ quite a lot by country as well. What Deputy Ryan said is a basic characterisation of it but if one steps back from the labour share as a measure, there are a couple of things going on and this partly relates to political pressures as well. First, the growth of GDP is lower, which is bad for everyone. Second, it is true that in many countries labour share has been on a declining trend and has been weak since the crisis. The development of labour has been quite interesting since the crisis. On the upside, one of the few things that has surprised in many OECD countries is that employment has held up or recovered a bit more strongly than we would have expected given the growth in GDP, which up course pushes up the labour share a bit, but what has been exceptionally weak is wages. That really reflects a combination of two things, depending on where it is, but in general there has been a big weakness in productivity growth and when that happens people do not get wage increases and that may partly be linked to the resilience of labour. The other thing is that there probably are some pressures in the labour market which means it would be very hard to push up wages. Something we see across many OECD countries is an absence of wage pressure. Even in places like the US, it is taking a very long time to get any evidence at all that wages are pushing up. Even though the economy has been unspectacular, it has actually been there for a quite a long time and usually normal economic relationships tell us that there should have been much more wage pressure than there was. A number of things are going on, not all of which are well understood, but they fit together to make a whole.