Macroeconomic Policy Changes and Its Impact on Trade Unions, an Empirical Study on OECD Countries for the Period 2001-2020

This study examines the macroeconomic variables affecting trade union rate membership in OECD nations from 2001 to 2020. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has 38 of the most industrialized countries globally, which counts more than 80% of the global GDP; analyzing the macroeconomic movements of these countries means that we most likely know the variance of the global macroeconomic changes. We target the effect of employability, expenditure on education, unemployment, inflation, FDI, economic growth, wages, and salaries on trade union participation of employers. To conduct this research, we used data from World Bank, ILO, and OECD for 38 countries during the period 2001-2020, conducting a panel data Fixed Effect non-linear regression model with robust effect considering the non-normality and the possibility of heteroscedasticity of some of the variables. The results show that employers in the industry, the productivity in the service sector, and wages will increase the enrolment in a trade union, but on the other side, an increase of FDI and unemployment rates will decrease the association of employers to be in a trade union.