For 99% of the world’s population, salary is the main source of wealth since it is their only way of income main. However, the data collected by one of the largest fixed income managers, point out that the weight of salaries in global wealth is at its historic lows, while that of financial capital takes the largest share.
This imbalance is not accidental and explains why the economy can show growth while many employees suffer to make ends meet.
The disconnection between productivity and wages. A good example of this phenomenon is we see in the data of the Economic Policy Institute Updated to January 2026, between the fourth quarter of 1979 and the third quarter of 2025, productivity in the US increased by 90.2%, while hourly wage compensation only increased by 33.0% during this period. This means that the financial productivity has grown 2.7 times more than salaries, generating a gap that benefits companies, senior executives and shareholders, but not the employees of those same companies.
He historical of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis leaves another illustrative example of this phenomenon. Since the late 1970s, the relationship between wages and GDP in the United States has been progressively sinking, except when serious global crises have occurred: in the 2000s with the dotcom crisis, and in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. That is to say, salaries have been losing weight in the wealth of countries for decades.
History of the relationship of salaries with respect to GDP in the US
The historical minimum of the salary weight. The share of income from work has gone from representing approximately two-thirds of global GDP in the early 1980s to 52.4% of global GDP today, the rate lowest in the historical series according to the International Labor Organization. According to this organization, if employees received the same proportion of salaries to GDP as in 2004, global salaries would increase by an additional 2.4 trillion.
This imbalance is mainly due to the fact that the economy rewards more capital returns than the human effort of work (salaries), with companies focused on obtaining quick returns for shareholders instead of raising payrolls.
Increase in productivity and wages
The impact of AI on salaries. In recent years, the development of artificial intelligence is beginning to increase this gap by automating tasks. at entry points. Research from the University of Navarra determined that the arrival of ChatGPT (and other LLM models) drove down wages of companies most exposed to AI by up to 4.5% on average, compared to companies less exposed to automation.
The salary impact was greater among junior workers, that they lost 6.3% in starting salaries and a 4% drop in job offers, while senior workers lost an average of 5.9% in their salary level.
Causes behind the turn towards capital. From PIMCO they explain that companies use intangible capital such as software and data (AI, in short), to scale profits without using more labor in the process. That decoupling of the hand work would be reducing the bargaining power of employees, while AI encourages companies to contain payroll expenses to maximize dividends.
Since the 1990s, factors such as globalization, loss of bargaining power of unions, and concentration of capital in large firms have eroded the labor portion of income. Tiffany Wilding, an economist at PIMCO, said: “Starting with computers and software, and now adding automation and artificial intelligence, technological tools are easily replacing mid-level and increasingly skilled labor.”
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Image | Unsplash (Marcus Locke)
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