Define the real wage, Macroeconomics

Assignment Help:

Q. Define the Real wage?

Consider the following scenario. You work full time and during January 2008 you make 2000 euro after tax. A certain basket of goods and services costs 100 euro in January that means that your salary will buy you 20 such baskets.

In February, you receive a 10% wage increase and you make 2200 euro after tax. Does this imply that you can purchase 10% more baskets - which is 22 - in February? Well, not essentially.

Number of baskets that you can purchase in February depends on the possible changes in prices as well. If price of a basket increases by 3% to 103 euro your 2200 will buy you 2200/103 = 21.36 baskets of 7% more than in January. Albeit your wage has increased by 10%, you can only increase your consumption of baskets by 7%. We say that real wage has increased by 7%.

Officially, we define real wage as the nominal wage divided by a price index (characteristically CPI). In the instance above, your real wage was 20 in January and 21.36 in February if we use the price of basket as a price index. Remember that nominal wage will tell you your wage in units of currency whereas the real wage will tell you your wage in baskets of services and goods and this is more significant to us.

So we care about increases in real wages not in the nominal wages. If you found out that Ken who works in another country, got a 50% increase in his wage every year, you can initially be quite happy for Ken. If you then found out that inflation in country where Ken works is 70%, you should actually feel sorry for him. His real wage is 1.5/1.7 = 88% of his real wage year before - a real wage cut by 12%.


Related Discussions:- Define the real wage

Find the market equilibrium value, Frovea's currency is called the fromark,...

Frovea's currency is called the fromark, and Olympia's currency is called the olymark. In the market in which fromarks and olymarks are traded for each other, the supply of and dem

Price of steel jumped, Your firm usually uses about 200-300 tons of steel p...

Your firm usually uses about 200-300 tons of steel per year. Last year, you purchased 100 tons of steel than needed (at a price of $200 per ton) In the meantime, the price of steel

IS-lm model, Derive the following equilibrium for the IS-LM model:

Derive the following equilibrium for the IS-LM model:

Question one hw, A small country can import a good at a world price of 10 p...

A small country can import a good at a world price of 10 per unit. The domestic supply curve of the good is S = 20 + 10P The demand curve is D = 400 – 5P In addition, each unit of

Factors shift out the ppc, What factors shift out the PPC and what is the o...

What factors shift out the PPC and what is the opportunity cost of the economy moving out to get back on the PPC? Explain?

Signs which indicate increament in the sales of the cilent, One of our clie...

One of our clients is a major homebuilder in the Midwest. This company believes that sales of their new homes are highly correlated with business cycles in the overall US economy.

Groth model, what role does interst rate play in refernce to output?

what role does interst rate play in refernce to output?

Mankiw, Using the Mundell-Fleming model, describe how an increase in a coun...

Using the Mundell-Fleming model, describe how an increase in a country’s risk premium on the world interest rate can result in a higher level of real income. Under what circumstanc

Fiscal, what is the supply side

what is the supply side

Write Your Message!

Captcha
Free Assignment Quote

Assured A++ Grade

Get guaranteed satisfaction & time on delivery in every assignment order you paid with us! We ensure premium quality solution document along with free turntin report!

All rights reserved! Copyrights ©2019-2020 ExpertsMind IT Educational Pvt Ltd