Substandard Wages

This completely revised and updated edition of Norman Frumkin's acclaimed work offers vital information for the urgent growing debate on the state of the nation's economy. Frumkin makes complex ideas and statistical data accessible to people without special training in economics. His goal in this book is to provide a better understanding of the performance of the American economy, and a basis for evaluating proposals intended to influence its future course. Using data current through the first half of 2003, Frumkin focuses on the meaning and use of a wide array of indicators of economic growth, employment, wages, productivity, investment, saving, and finance in assesing the current state of the U.S. economy and forecasting future developments. Equally useful for economists, students, investors, journalists, and anyone concerned with the economy, this totally revised edition includes detailed coverage of many important new topics, such as terrorism's impact on the economy, federal debt and interest rates, job openings and unemployment, government spending and taxes, the 2001 recession, and much more. Equally usefull for economists, students, investors, and anyone concerned with the economy, this totally revised edition includes detailed coverage of many important new topics, including: --reclaiming American manufacturing; --differential patterns of the expansions of the 1980s and the 1990s-2000; --wealth effect of stock market and housing prices; --significance of consumer confidentce surveys; --age of nonresidential structures and equipment and future investment; --housing affordability; --government spending and tax components; --frequency of tax changes; --taxation and work effort; --sustainability of balance of payments deficits and foreign indebtedness; --jobless recoveries in 1991-92 and 2002-03; --interstate variations in income and unionization; --interstate variations in unemployment insurance; --job openings and unemployment; --terrorism impacts on economic growth and productivity; --spread of oil price changes to the non-energy sectors