Good day to all. My name is Pablo Soriano Mena. I am a former student. I studied my master's degree in economics at the University of Essex and I graduated last year. I want to begin by saying my biggest apologies for not being able to meet in person today, but I really want to thank the University Journal staff for organising this event and for inviting me. Today I will deliver a presentation on the declining labour share of income across the globe, which is based on my publication with the Essex Student Journal. Let's begin. In order to discuss the implications of declining labour share of income, it is necessary to understand some of the key concepts associated with it. And given that the audience today is very likely to be very diverse, I do not expect everyone to know what these concepts are in economics. So I will try to explain them in very simple terms by using a pizza as an example. So let's think of the GDP of an economy, the gross domestic product, as the sum of all of the elements that go into a pizza. This includes the dough, the cheese, the sauce, toppings, but also the work that goes into preparing. The sum of all of these elements together and the labour is what is measured in this way, in the same way all of the goods and services produced in an economy, be it groceries, clothes, haircuts and so on, the total value of all of these goods and services, it's what is considered to be the GDP of an economy. Now, to understand the Labour share, let's imagine that pizza that was prepared. And let's just think of a slice, and that's the slice that goes to the workers that produce the pizza. In other words, it is the money that is earned in our country by the people that provided value, that added that value. In order to understand all of this and to calculate, how do we calculate the labour share of income, let's think of it as how do we calculate it, how do we measure how big that slice is? In economics, we do have formulas and equations to calculate that. We're not going to go into that, but let's just think that as a percentage, how big that slice is in comparison to the pizza. So let's move on. Let's discuss the evidence of this decline. I obtained this data from the United Nations. It is the data utilised to measure progress towards one of the Sustainable Development Goals as the G10 on inequality. And you can see it is the labour share as a percentage of GDP worldwide, which is what we're talking. You can see that there's clearly a downward trend. We're talking from 2004 to 2017. And the only two years where we do not see a decline is in 2008 and 2009. And that's the years of the Great Financial Crisis, and this is mostly because the GDP worldwide decreased rather than the compensation to workers increase. So let's just think of it as as if, let's say the pizza got smaller, but the size of the slice kind of remains the same. So let's think of it that way, and let's look at the regions and what happened during the regions. So if we zoom in a little bit into this data and we desegregate by region, we see that yes, there is a decline that we saw worldwide, but not every region behaved in the same way. And most interestingly, is that two countries that are considered to be poorer, lower and middle income countries are the ones that are actually seeing a slight increase on the labour share of income in those economies. You see the case in Africa, you see the case in. Western Asia as well. And in Latin America. Whereas countries in Europe and North America, for example, are the ones that are showing the decline also in Oceania. So it's not that the entire world is going exactly experiencing the same thing, but that's important to take away. Into analysing this issue, we can think of different drivers that contribute to this decline. We can think of investments in capital rather than in labour. This is when firms decide to invest in their infrastructure or technology instead of the labour that provides the value of the services? There is also declining competition amongst firms, which is also related to superstar firms, which is when firms are too great and too big that they actually influence the market themselves. And then also there's another driver, which is trade and globalisation. And this is this plays out, all of them play out into this by the fact that sometimes firms try to save costs, and by doing so, they export their businesses or outsource their businesses to countries where labour is cheaper. And that's why sometimes we see a decline in northern countries or developed countries, and we see an increase in developing countries. This is also a relation to that. And another aspect that I talk about in my paper is about the interaction between inequality and technological change. We have seen that investments in automation and digitalisation can be linked to higher productivity. However, some experts show that there is concern about the widening gap between these high productivity little levels and median wages on workers. And some of the conclusions and recommendations that I do present on that paper is that. There is obviously the need for more inclusive policies and better regulation when it comes to technology implementation and advancements, but also a big element that I discover is the lack of indicators on the lack of data on what's going on in developing countries. And that's something that I wanted to highlight and to highlight as one of the main takeaways from this document. So that is my presentation, I want to thank you all for your attention, I know this is very short, but and I wish I would have been there to present this in person and to engage with you on some Q&A to hear any comments you may have. But please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you have any questions or any comments. And to conclude, I just want to thank the Essex Student Journal for inviting me and thank you again. I hope you enjoy the rest of the presentations and I hope you have a nice day. Thanks. Bye.