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A resources-reliant economy that’s steadily adding hundreds of thousands of jobs to push its unemployment rate down — while its workers put up with the worst wages growth since 1998. Say hello to … Canada.

Yep, the Canadians are in the same boat as us. According to the June jobs report in Canada, unemployment fell there to 6.5%, over 350,000 jobs had been created during the year (most of them full time). But wages in the year to March grew by just 1.1% — the lowest level of growth since 1998.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the current level of private sector wages growth in Australia is the lowest ever recorded since the series began in 1998, too. Overall wages growth (i.e. including the public sector) here isn’t much better here — at just 1.9%, or 1.8% if you’re in the private sector — despite unemployment dropping to 5.6%.

Are things any better across the Tasman? No. Despite unemployment below 5%, wages growth has been stuck at 1.6% for the past two years in New Zealand — a growth rate which is now below the rising level of inflation there.

And the Brits? Much worse than us. Real wages fell for much of 2016. In fact, real wages fell in the UK between 2008 and 2014, before making a modest recovery that petered out last year and worsened this year.

Similarly, in the United States, real wages fell between 2009 and 2014, before recovering strongly into 2016. But wages growth faltered this year, slipping back to 2.5%, despite continued strong jobs growth that has pushed unemployment in the US well below 5%.

Nor is it an Anglophone disease: wage growth in France has fallen since 2012 to the lowest level since the 1990s. Japan earliest this year experienced a return to falling real wages, with real wages falling at their fastest rate since 2015. In Germany, wages grew at their strongest level since the 1990s in 2015-16 — but that’s not saying much, because German workers and employers have, under Germany’s non-government, industry-level bargaining process — cut deals to keep wages growth down below productivity growth levels for years. Real wages growth in Germany reached 2.7% — but has since fallen back below 1%, despite unemployment falling below 4%. This has led to economic policymakers calling for German workers to take substantially higher pay rises in order to reduce Germany’s trade surplus — but workers are reluctant.

A wide diversity of economies, all suffering a similar problem of stagnant wages despite, except in the case of France, strong employment growth. And, noticeably, a wide diversity of company tax rates. Let’s use the US Congressional Budget Office’s recent comparison of international corporate tax rates to have a look. The United States: 39% statutory rate, 29% average rate (the total amount of corporate income taxes that companies pay relative to their income). Japan 37% statutory rate, 27.9%. So, wage stagnation in economies with relatively high company tax rates. The United Kingdom, statutory rate of 24% — now reduced to 19% — and average rate of 10.1%. Canada, statutory rate of 26.1%, average rate of 16.2%. Wage stagnation in economies with relatively low company tax rates. And Australia, 30% tax rate for large companies, average rate of 17% — wage stagnation here as well.

Whatever lowering company tax rates does, there’s no evidence that they have any effect on wages growth — indeed, the British experience appears to suggest a correlation between lowering company tax rates and falling real wages, not the opposite.

This is the core failing of neoliberalism, and why it is now dying. Households across the west were ready, if not overly happy, to accept the central trade-off of neoliberalism: that the rich, and companies, would become significantly wealthier and more powerful as long as everyone else also enjoyed rising income levels too. But market economies — or at least the increasingly bastardised version of market economics delivered in many countries — is now failing to meet its side of the bargain.