Efficiency-wage hypothesis and the operational production pattern

Abstract

An economy’s production set is the collection of all net output vectors that the economy is capable of producing with a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. The boundary of this set is called the production possibility frontier or PPF. We show that, if the efficiency-wage hypothesis holds, a country’s PPF, though conceptually valid, is an operationally irrelevant concept, because the economy never operates on the PPF, which is a view that ought to be appreciated in light of persistent unemployment in the new structure of economies of the post-21st-Centurycrisis world.