Real pay of typical workers has grown much more slowly than productivity over recent decades in several developed economies. This growing gap has been well-documented in the US (Bivens and Mishel 2015, 2021), Canada (Williams 2021), the UK (Teichgräber and Van Reenen 2021), and elsewhere. This phenomenon – often referred to as a ‘divergence’ or ‘decoupling’ of the pay of typical workers from productivity growth – is all the more striking because it has not always been this way. Bivens and Mishel (2015), for example, document that in the US, labour productivity and the average pay of typical workers grew at the same r ... (full story)