I would note that these developments in wages might be attributable to persistent concerns among firms that a rise in labor costs, including an increase in base pay, may undermine the future situation for corporate profits amid the lack of a rise in the expected productivity growth rate and in the expected medium- to long-term economic growth rate.
Our unfortunate script-writer would, in all likelihood, have been black-listed forever for bringing Hollywood and the guild of screenwriters in disrepute if he had also had the temerity to include in his screenplay of global financial and economic mayhem affecting the major countries and their systemically-important institutions a tableau with a starkly contrasting narrative: a tiny ultra-peripheral economy with a population of just 1.3 million; a fruit-salad of a nation with a rich diversity of languages, religions and ethnicities, and democratic to a fault; a success story sans pareil of: structural adjustment, demographic transition, diversification away from mono-crop dependence on sugar, export-driven industrialisation, off-shoring from banking and finance to business processes, and of economic transformation generally as it  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  weaned itself away from trade-preferences to the post-WTO world; an economy that has kept growing throughout the crisis when bigger economies contracted; an unemployment rate that has stayed below 8 per cent; an inflation rate that has tumbled from 10.9 per cent in April 2007 – the date of the establishment of the Monetary Policy Committee – to a historical low of 0.1 per cent in October 2009, to reach 4.8 per cent in December 2011; a total public debt of less than 60 per cent of GDP, much of it owed domestically with the balance held by multinational or national financial institutions, not commercial banks; a rising level of net international reserves from Rs85.8 bn in 2007 to Rs109.6 bn in 2011; a fiscal deficit of 3.2 per cent in 2011; gross FDI inflows of Rs10 bn in 2011, not far below the record level of 2010; a record profitability posted by the largest bank in the country, a domestic one that has been in business since 1838; and a free floating currency that has adjusted flexibly without the benefit of any controls to appreciate during the crisis with the exchange rate index, MERI 1, standing at 91.6 in December 2011 from its base of 100 in calendar year 2007.