490
Exchange rates, prices, and wages, 1277–2008
A mass meeting in Stockholm during the general strike in 1909. Source: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Storstrejk.jpg.
in the same manner throughout the entire era. Industries like metal and engineering, whose product varieties defy efforts to capture their nature by labels, are difficult per se, whereas other difficulties arise mostly because of breaks in classifications. Another closely related problem is the effects of economic growth and technical development on the evolution of skill requirements (human capital), the tasks workers are set to carry out and labour’s working conditions more generally. All this has of course changed a lot since 1860. The only thing a worker in the wood industry in 2007 has in common with his peer 150 years earlier is probably the material (wood) that is being processed. To deal with inter-temporal inconsistencies in the definition of industries and the different sources and methodologies used before and after 1913, indices of average hourly earnings for nine industries are compiled with no attention paid to the actual wage levels in different industries. Still, the construction of an aggregate measure requires allowance for these wage levels because an important part of the movement in average hourly earnings may be due to the changing proportions of low and high wage occupations. Modern economic growth often entails the expansion of dynamic industries whose wage levels exceed those of industries sliding into decline. The approach used in the present study is therefore designed to provide an estimate of levels of average hourly earnings in nine industries, with indices of hourly earnings in