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Equality, Employment, and Budgetary Restraint: The Trilemma of the Service Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Torben Iversen
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Anne Wren
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the postindustrial economy from a political economy perspective. It identifies a set of specific distributional trade-offs associated with the new role played by the services sector as the chief source of employment growth in advanced democracies over the last three decades. It is argued that three core policy objectives—budgetary restraint, wage equality, and expansion of employment—constitute a political “trilemma” that allows only two of the goals to be successfully pursued at the same time. Using a combination of statistical and caseoriented analysis, the authors demonstrate the political and economic salience of the trilemma, the distributional tensions inherent in each strategy to cope with it, and the political-institutional constraints under which these strategies are chosen.

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Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1998

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