Share systems and unemployment: a theoretical analysis

Professors M.L.Weitzman and J.E.Meade have recently suggested, in influential books, a cure for unemployment and stagflation that departs drastically from traditional Keynesian policies of demand management: the replacement of existing wage contracts for the employment of labour with some kind of share contracts.

This proposal has stirred up a lively debate among academics and policy-makers.;This book attempts an overall assessment of the debate and comes to rather pessimistic conclusions about the viability of sharing arrangements because, in a labour market such as the one we have today, they arouse strenuous opposition from tenured workers.

The authors' argument is that successful implementation of a share economy requires some substantial change in the typical structure of property rights of modern capitalism.