By Jeremy Gaunt
LONDON (Reuters) - Unemployment in the world's biggest developed economies has been falling, at least since the end of the financial crisis. But wages, in the main, have not reacted as might be expected.
They have generally either grown only modestly, or even fallen.
Take, for example, resurgent Germany. Since 2012, the unemployment rate has tumbled to the lowest level since reunification. Wages and salaries have grown -- but only gradually and at nothing like a rate to imply pressure.
It is even clearer in Japan, where unemployment this year has fallen to a more than 20-year low of just 2.8 percent
"Everything tells us the labour market is tight in Japan," said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics. "(But) the one place we are not seeing labour market tightness in is wages, which aren't rising at all."
One impact of this globally is that inflation has not picked up much despite the massive amount of stimulus hurled at it by central banks, including negligible or even negative interest rates. Indeed, it may be one reason why some banks appear to be less worried about low inflation than they were.
For the worker, the lack of inflation has masked some of the wage stagnation. (It has only become a hot issue in Britain, for example, since inflation took off after the Brexit vote.)
But this may not last. September's GfK sentiment index suggested German consumer morale may be about to cool as a result of a more negative expectation for incomes.
The more-workers-less-pay-growth phenomenon, meanwhile, is the subject of a new report from International Monetary Fund economists Gee Hee Hong, Zsoka Koczan, Weicheng Lian and Malhar Nabar.
They find the disconnect between unemployment and wages to be the result of a number of factors -- including the slowdown of productivity -- that are relatively new and which are probably not going to go away.
A key factor is an abundant workforce -- labour market slack in the jargon. But that is a seeming contradiction given the record low unemployment rates in some places.
It comes down to people working fewer hours than they would like and the trend towards temporary contracts -- the gig economy, zero-hours contracts and so on.
That leaves a large number of workers for companies to choose from if wage demands rise.
"Despite employment growth, hours per worker have continued to decline and involuntary part-time employment has increased in more than two-thirds of countries," the IMF report notes.
A second factor is, in effect, the impact of globalisation and a more integrated global economy.