Download or read book The Unbearable Stability of the German Wage Structure written by Eswar Prasad and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2000 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this paper is to document the evolution of the German wage structure over the period 1984-97. The paper also investigates the roles of various factors that could have influenced patterns of changes in the wage structure. While a documentation of the evolution of the wage structure in Germany is interesting in its own right, the analysis in this paper, by facilitating comparisons with changes in the wage structures of other industrial countries, could potentially provide important clues to understanding the poor functioning of the German labor market in recent years. In particular, the analysis sheds light on the reasons behind and possible solutions for a particularly troubling problem, the high and rising rate of nonemployment among low-skilled workers.