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HAS NEW ZEALAND'S EMPLOYMENT CONTRACTS ACT INCREASED EMPLOYMENT AND REDUCED WAGES? *
Author(s) -
MALONEY TIM
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
australian economic papers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.351
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1467-8454
pISSN - 0004-900X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8454.1997.tb00848.x
Subject(s) - earnings , economics , legislation , labour economics , wage , employment protection legislation , work (physics) , demographic economics , unemployment , macroeconomics , political science , mechanical engineering , accounting , law , engineering
The Employment Contracts Act 1991 substantively altered the structure of the industrial relations system in New Zealand. This study estimates the effects of this legislation on employment levels and average hourly earnings in this country using disaggregate industry level data from 1986(1) to 1996(2). In the five years following the enactment of the ECA, nonagricultural union membership declined from 49.5 to 27.2 per cent of the work force. This is an important consideration because our regression analysis suggests that this decrease in unionisation is solely responsible for any effects of the ECA on the labour market. Full‐time equivalent employment grew by 14.2 per cent between 1991(2) and 1996(2). At least 2.3 percentage points of this employment growth can be attributed to this legislation. If the ECA was partly responsible for the recent economic recovery, then more of this employment growth could be credited to this act. There are two basic reasons why the ECA might have increased employment over the past five years. It could have lowered hourly earnings, or increased effective labour demand. Estimates of a reduced‐form wage equation and a structural labour demand function both point to the latter explanation. Since there is no statistical evidence that ECA reduced hourly earnings, falling unionisation must have increased effective labour demand.