Collaborative Research on Trade Unions, Employers' Organizations and Collective Bargaining: Data Collection andAnalysis for Nineteen Countries

近年来，发达工业民主国家工会、雇主协会的组织结构和工资谈判过程一直是大量研究的主题。自1974年以来，宏观经济表现的显著跨国差异促使学者们研究工资设定制度影响劳动力市场运作的方式。大多数文献认为，集中的谈判制度通过阻止个别工会以牺牲其他工会或根本没有工会的工人为代价来寻求提高自己成员的工资，从而产生了更好的宏观经济结果，特别是降低了失业率。然而，许多研究提出了相反的观点，即分散的工资设置提供了最大的灵活性和工资对当地劳动力市场条件的敏感性。最近，高度集中和高度分散的系统都比中间集中化水平的系统工作得更好的中间立场得到了广泛接受。迄今为止的所有研究都是在薄弱的实证基础上进行的。基本问题在于，没有人制定出适当的措施，衡量可能影响经济表现的工资设定制度的不同属性。在这项研究中，调查人员继续编纂一个系统的跨国和纵向数据库，涵盖了工资设定过程中最重要的制度特征。在收集数据时，调查人员将二手来源的信息、各国主要劳动力市场参与者提供的数据以及专家调查汇总在一起。他们的数据将被构建，以便在不同时期和国家之间进行可靠的比较。在这些数据的基础上（这些数据将公开供其他学者使用），调查人员建议构建工会、雇主和集体谈判组织的关键方面的指标。最后，他们打算用这些指标来检验议价制度、工资形成和总体经济绩效各方面之间的关系。＊＊＊

9309391 Golden The organizational structure of trade unions, employers' associations and the process of wage bargaining in advanced industrial democracies has been the subject of considerable research in recent years. Since 1974, the striking cross-national differences in macroeconomic performance has led scholars to study the ways that wage-setting institutions affect how well the labor market functions. The majority of the literature argues that centralized bargaining systems produce superior macroeconomic outcomes, expecially lower unemployment, by preventing individual unions from seeking to improve their own members' wages at the expense of workers who belong to other unions or to no union at all. Yet many studies argue the opposite, that decentralized wage setting offers the greatest flexibility and sensitivity of wages to conditions in the local labor market. Most recently, the intermediate position that both highly centralized and highly decentralized systems work better than systems with intermediate levels of centralization has gained wide acceptance. All of the research to date has proceeded on a weak empirical base. The basic problem is that no one has developed adequate measures of the different attributes of wage-setting institutions that might matter for economic performance. In this research, the investigators continue their work of compiling a sustematic cross- national and longitudinal data base coverning the most important institutional characteristics of the wage setting process. In collecting the data, the investigators put together information from secondary sources, data supplied by the major labor market actors in each of the countries, and expert surveys. Their data will be constructed to allow reliable comparisons over time and between countries. On the basis of the data, which will be made publicly available for use by other scholars, the investigators propose to construct indicators of critical aspects of the organization of unions, employers and collective bargaining. Finally, they intend to use the indicators to test the relationship between bargaining institutions, wage formation, and various aspects of aggregate economic performance. ***