Statutory Minimum Wage Controls: A Critical Review of their Effects on Labour Markets, Employment, and Incomes

Around the world, minimum wage controls have excluded low cost competitors from labour markets, hampered firms in reducing wage costs during trade downturns, and caused various industrial-economic inefficiencies as well as unemployment, poverty, and price rises. This study analyses national minimum wage fixing as a special form of political-economic protectionism – the equivalent of tariff barriers to low cost imports. It sees it as violating Treaty of Rome and other basic guarantees of free trade and markets in labour services in Europe. The widely used study contains a detailed critique of the recently established British national minimum wage fixing regime.