Resumen de Workers' earnings in the UK before and after privatisation: a study of five industries
In this paper we give new evidence on the impact of British privatisation on wages in selected industries. We compare trends in the privatised firms and in the economy as a whole. We construct long time-series of different measures of labour earnings, spanning from 1970 to 2002. The source is administrative data on labour earnings taken from the New Earnings Survey (NES), an individual panel survey carried out at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and used as the official source for annual publications on labour earnings by industries (three digits) in the UK. While mainstream privatisation theory has suggested that under state ownership workers earned high wages because of unionisation and soft budget constraints, we do not find any evidence of decline of relative wages after privatisation. We discuss possible interpretations.
