Labor Economics Commons^™

Re-Conceptualizing The Economic Incorporation Of Immigrants: A Comparison Of The Mexican And Vietnamese, Shannon Gleeson

Shannon Gleeson

Using data from the 2000 5 per cent Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, this article advocates three shifts in our theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding immigrant economic incorporation. First, through a comparison of Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants, these findings highlight the importance of an immigrant population’s relationship to the state for economic outcomes, and cautions against analyses that aggregate the foreign-born population. Second, through a joint analysis of unemployment and poverty outcomes, these findings call for researchers to be specific about the varied aspects of ‘‘economic incorporation’’ and distinguish between factors that drive labor market access, and those that …

Lifetime Migration In Colombia: Tests Of The Expected Income Hypothesis, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] People migrate and areas gain or lose population for a variety of reasons: differences in potential earnings, in job availability, in schooling opportunities, in quality of life, proximity to friends and relatives, and so on. The economic model of migration holds that the central factor determining individual migration decisions is the perceived opportunity to attain higher economic status. Area populations are expected to change differentially according to the economic opportunities offered. In empirical research in developed countries, economic factors have been shown to underlie most migration decisions. In developing countries, where the economic situation of the populace is far …

Income-Generating Functions In A Low Income Country: Colombia, Gary S. Fields, T. Paul Schultz

Gary S Fields

Income generating functions are statistical tools used to explain income inequality and other economic outcomes and behavior. These functions are often associated with a strict human capital framework, but they need not be. Instead, they may be viewed as a reduced form equation summarizing the relationship between income and various personal and locational characteristics. Following this latter interpretation, we develop the regression and analysis of variance approaches to income generating functions and estimate them empirically using micro-economic data from one low income country, Colombia. Proceeding to increasingly parsimonious specifications of income generating functions, insights are gained into the structure of …

Employment, Income Distribution And Economic Growth In Seven Small Open Economies, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Resurgent interest has been manifested among development economists in trickle-down, i.e., the view that the more rapid the rate of economic growth, the more rapid the improvement in employment and income distribution. Throughout this paper, the term ‘income distribution’ will refer to the location and dispersion of the pattern of incomes, i.e., to ‘absolute incomes and poverty’ and to ‘relative income inequality’. Empirical evidence supports trickle-down in some cases, but the evidence is contrary to trickle-down in others.

These data indicate:

1. A high rate of economic growth is neither necessary nor sufficient for inequality to decline.
2. A high rate …

Employment And Economic Growth In Costa Rica, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Costa Rica’s economic growth in the last 25 years has had favorable labor market and income distribution consequences. Overall, employment growth kept pace with labor force growth, the mix of jobs improved, real wages rose, and relative inequality and absolute poverty fell. But during the economic crisis of 1980-82, when real per capita income plummeted, labor market conditions deteriorated markedly: unemployment doubled, employment composition worsened, and real wages fell by 40%. Growth, labor market conditions, and income distribution have moved together.

Earnings Mobility In Times Of Growth And Decline: Argentina From 1996 To 2003, Gary S. Fields, María Laura Sánchez Puerta

Gary S Fields

In recent years, the economy of Argentina has experienced both rapid economic growth and severe economic decline. In this paper, we use a series of one-year long panels to study who gained the most in pesos when the economy grew and who lost the most in pesos when the economy contracted. Various considerations led us to expect that mobility would be divergent—that is, that the individuals who started with the highest initial earnings would enjoy the largest earnings gains in pesos. Contrary to expectations and for a wide range of specifications, mobility is found to be mostly convergent, sometimes neutral, …

The Employment Problem In Korea, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

What Korea has is not an "unemployment problem" but rather an "employment problem." The employment problem includes continued high unemployment, but it goes well beyond it, also encompassing falling labor earnings, rising poverty and inequality, disproportionate impacts on disadvantaged groups, informalisation of employment, increased job insecurity, and consequent social strains. This paper documents Korea's employment problem, characterizes the problem as deficient aggregate demand rather than frictional or structural unemployment, examines in some detail three of the most important elements of the social safety net (the Employment Insurance System, the Livelihood Protection Program, and public works), and considers four major ways …

Segmented Labour Markets In South Africa, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] The textbook labour market model aggregates all workers, all employers and all sectors of the economy into a single labour market. In this single labour market, workers supply labour, employers demand labour and the rate of pay (termed wage for shorthand) is determined by the intersection of supply and demand. Segmented labour market analysis proceeds from a different starting point. Workers, employers and sectors are not aggregated together. Rather, two or more labour market segments are identified, the groupings reflecting fundamental differences in how labour supply, labour demand and wage-determination mechanisms operate in different segments. For example, in the …

Self-Employment And Poverty In Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

A key way for the world’s poor—nearly half of humanity—to escape poverty is to earn more for their labor. Most of the world’s poor people are self-employed, but because there are few opportunities in most developing countries for them to earn enough to escape poverty, they are working hard but working poor. Two key policy planks in the fight against poverty should be: raising the returns to self-employment and creating more opportunities to move from self-employment into higher paying wage employment.

Challenges And Policy Lessons For The Growth-Employment-Poverty Nexus In Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Productivity growth and structural change are generally considered to be important determinants of economic growth. However recent research revealed that they do not necessarily lead to higher growth and employment rates. Recent studies, drawing on data from developing countries, showed that only the “right” kind of productivity growth resulted in higher employment rates. Enterprises in Africa and Latin America caught up in matters of technology; however, this process resulted in a substitution of employment by technology. The same is true for structural change; only the “right” kind of structural change caused more growth and employment. Whereas in Asia, labour shifted …

Are African Workers Getting Ahead In The New South Africa? Evidence From Kwazulu-Natal, 1993-1998, Paul L. Cichello, Gary S. Fields, Murray Leibbrandt

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] In this paper, we use the KIDS panel data to answer three questions about the ‘progress’ of African workers in this one province in post-apartheid South Africa. First, how have African workers progressed as a group? Secondly, which African workers have progressed the most, and by how much have they progressed? Thirdly, to what extent is the progress made by workers driven by transitions between employment and unemployment, or between informal and formal sector employment? We reach the following major findings. First, African workers in KwaZulu-Natal had quite diverse experiences, but experienced positive progress on average. Second, those who …

Employment And Development In The Developing World: Taking Stock Of What Research Can Teach Us, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Productivity growth and structural change are generally considered to be important determinants of economic growth. However recent research revealed that they do not necessarily lead to higher growth and employment rates. Recent studies, drawing on data from developing countries, showed that only the “right” kind of productivity growth resulted in higher employment rates. Enterprises in Africa and Latin America caught up in matters of technology; however, this process resulted in a substitution of employment by technology. The same is true for structural change; only the “right” kind of structural change caused more growth and employment. Whereas in Asia, labour shifted …

Earnings Mobility, Inequality, And Economic Growth In Argentina, Mexico, And Venezuela, Gary S. Fields, Robert Duval-Hernandez, Samuel Freije, Maria Laura Sanchez Puerta

Gary S Fields

This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask two major questions. First, do panel income changes favor the income recipients who started at the top of the income distribution (“divergent mobility”) or those who started at the bottom (“convergent mobility”)? And second, are the groups that are found to gain the most when the economy is growing those that are found to lose the most when the economy is contracting (“symmetry of mobility”) or is the pattern asymmetric in the sense that the same …

Falling Labor Income Inequality In Korea’S Economic Growth: Patterns And Underlying Causes, Gyeongjoon Yoo, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Over the last twenty-five years, the economy of the Republic of Korea achieved a remarkable growth rate of 7 percent per year in real per capita income, causing it to be labeled, justifiably, as a “miracle economy.” This exceptional economic growth has been accompanied by an even more exceptional fall in labor income inequality. Using a newly-developed methodology, we use data from Korea’s Occupational Wage Surveys to quantify the importance of various factors that have contributed to the fall in labor income inequality in Korea. We find the most important factors explaining the level of income inequality are job tenure, …

Experimentation And Decentralization In China’S Labor Relations, Eli D. Friedman, Sarosh Kuruvilla

Sarosh Kuruvilla

In this introduction to the special issue ‘Changing work, labour and employment relations in China’, we argue that China is taking an experimental and decentralized approach to the development of new labor relations frameworks. Particular political constraints in China prevent interest aggregation among workers, as the central state sees this as posing a risk to social stability. Firms and local governments have been given a degree of space to experiment with different arrangements, as long as the categorical ban on independent unions is not violated. The consequence has been an increasingly differentiated labor relations landscape, with significant variation by region …

Welfare Reform, Precarity And The Re-Commodification Of Labour, Ian Greer

Ian Greer

While welfare reform matters for workers and workplaces, it is peripheral in English-language sociology of work and industrial relations research. This article’s core proposition is that active labour market policies (ALMPs) are altering the institutional constitution of the labour market by intensifying market discipline within the workforce. This re-commodification effect is specified drawing on Marxism, comparative institutionalism, German-language sociology, and English-language social policy analysis. Because of administrative failures and employer discrimination, however, ALMPs may worsen precarity without achieving the stated goal of increasing labour-market participation.

Decomposing Ldc Inequality, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] At the present time, there is great interest among development economists in the problem of economic inequality in less developed countries (LDCs). Studies of the determinants of inequality follow either of two general approaches. The more traditional approach is associated with names like Kuznets (1963), Chenery and associates (1960, 1968, 1975), Adelman and Morris (1973), Ahluwalia (1976) and Chiswick (1971). These studies share a common methodology, consisting basically of looking at a cross-section of countries, and (1) measuring the degree of inequality in each, (2) measuring other characteristics of each country (e.g., level of GNP, its rate of growth, …

Changing Labor Market Conditions And Economic Development In Hong Kong, The Republic Of Korea, Singapore, And Taiwan, China, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

In the newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China), the entire working population has benefited from labor market institutions. The East Asian NIEs attained and maintained generally full employment, improved their job mixes, raised real earnings, and lowered their rates of poverty. This article reaches two principal conclusions. First, labor market conditions continued to improve in all four economies in the 1980s at rates remarkably similar to their rates of aggregate economic growth. Second, labor market repression was not a major factor in the growth experiences of these economies in the 1980s. …

Higher Education And Income Distribution In A Less Developed Country, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] The primary purpose of this paper is to empirically test among both the intra- and the inter-generational version of these three hypotheses for higher (i.e. post-secondary) levels of education for one less developed country, Kenya. A secondary purpose is to investigate other economic aspects of spending on higher education, most notably the question of horizontal equity in school finance. Before proceeding, a methodological point is in order. There is no consensus in the public economics literature on what is a suitable criterion for assessing the equitability of a fiscal programme. At least three criteria may be distinguished (the terminology …

The Dynamics Of Poverty, Inequality And Economic Well-Being: African Economic Growth In Comparative Perspective, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Two hundred and fifty million Africans (about 45% of the population) are poor. In rural areas, where most Africans live, there is, alas, a 'poor majority'. Rural poverty rates range from 37% in Madagascar and 41% in Kenya to 88% in Zambia and 94% in Ghana (Table 1). It is hard to imagine an issue in development economics that is of greater importance to humankind than the effects of economic growth on poverty and economic well-being. Yet there is remarkably little consensus on this vitally important issue, as illustrated by the following two polar positions: New patterns of growth will …

Changes In Poverty And Inequality In Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper presents new data on poverty, inequality, and growth in those developing countries of the world for which the requisite statistics are available. Economic growth is found generally but not always to reduce poverty. Growth, however, is found to have very little to do with income inequality. Thus the "economic laws" linking the rate of growth and the distribution of benefits receive only very tenuous empirical support here.

Income Distribution In Developing Economies: Conceptual, Data, And Policy Issues In Broad-Based Growth, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] The aim of economic development is to raise the standard of living of a country's people, especially its poor. Economic growth, particularly when broadly based, is a means to that end. 'Underdevelopment' can be defined as a state of severely constrained choices. When one is choosing from among an undesirable set of alternatives, the outcome will itself be undesirable. Standards of living will be low. If standards of living are to be improved, people must have a better set of alternatives from which to choose. 'Economic development' is the process by which the constraints on choices are relaxed. Based …

Experimentation And Decentralization In China’S Labor Relations, Eli D. Friedman, Sarosh Kuruvilla

Eli D Friedman

In this introduction to the special issue ‘Changing work, labour and employment relations in China’, we argue that China is taking an experimental and decentralized approach to the development of new labor relations frameworks. Particular political constraints in China prevent interest aggregation among workers, as the central state sees this as posing a risk to social stability. Firms and local governments have been given a degree of space to experiment with different arrangements, as long as the categorical ban on independent unions is not violated. The consequence has been an increasingly differentiated labor relations landscape, with significant variation by region …

Getting Through The Hard Times Together? Chinese Workers And Unions Respond To The Economic Crisis, Eli D. Friedman

Eli D Friedman

How do post-socialist unions respond to market crisis? And what are the implications of this response for labor representation? Drawing on literature on post-socialist labor and union democracy, I argue that economic crisis affects not just labor – capital and labor – state relations, but also the relationship between union representatives and workers. Such a dynamic is highlighted by an empirical account of the divergent activities of workers and All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) unions in China following the economic crisis of 2008. While the union responded to mass unemployment with an administrative and policy-oriented strategy, workers took to …

Alienated Politics: Labour Insurgency And The Paternalistic State In China, Eli Friedman

Eli D Friedman

Is there a labour movement in China? This contribution argues that China does not have a labour movement, but that contestation between workers, state and capital is best characterized as a form of ‘alienated politics’. Widespread worker resistance is highly effective at the level of the firm be-cause of its ability to inflict losses on capital and disrupt public order. But authoritarian politics in China prevent workers from formulating political demands. Despite the spectacular repressive capacity of the state, the central government has in fact responded to highly localized resistance by passing generally pro-labour legislation over the past decade. The …

Insurgency And Institutionalization: The Polanyian Countermovement And Chinese Labor Politics, Eli D. Friedman

Eli D Friedman

Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi's theory of the countermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Specifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined "moments": the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the market, and the institutional moment, when class compromise is established in the economic and political spheres. In China, the transition from insurgency to institutionalization has thus …

Movimientos Obreros Y Por Los Derechos Humanos En América Latina: Convergencia, Divergencia Y Consecuencias Para La Promoción De Los Derechos Económicos, Sociales Y Culturales [Labor Movements And Human Rights In Latin America: Convergence, Divergence, And The Implications For The Promotion Of Economic, Social And Cultural Rights], Maria Lorena Cook

Maria Lorena Cook

[Excerpt] Los derechos propios del trabajo forman parte de los derechos humanos hace mucho tiempo y gozan del reconocimiento de pactos internacionales. La Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos, adoptada por la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, en 1948, enumera los derechos a condiciones de trabajo justas y favorables; a igual remuneración por trabajo de igual valor; a una remuneración equitativa y favorable, y a formar sindicatos y afiliarse a ellos. El Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos (PIDCP) incluye los derechos a la libertad de asociación y a formar sindicatos y afiliarse a ellos. El Pacto Internacional de Derechos …

Les Relations Industrielles Mexicaines Et La Democratic Dans Le Context De L'Alena [Mexican Industrial Relations And Democracy Under Nafta], Maria Lorena Cook

Maria Lorena Cook

Le Mexique est presentement en train de vivre une importante transition, qu'il s'agisse de son modele de developpement economique ou de son systeme politique. Sur le plan economique, le Mexique est passe d'un modele d'industrialisation sous une logique de substitution d'importations par des biens domestiques, modele forge dans les annees 30 et 40, a une strategie de developpement axee sur l'exportation et basee sur un modele neo-liberal. Sur le plan politique, le regime mexicain a subi de tres fortes pressions pour que son systeme, de type autoritaire, domine depuis plus de 60 ans par le Parti revolutionnaire institutionnel (PRI), fasse …

Relaciones Industriales En America Del Norte: Sindicalismo Y Sector Automotriz En Los Estados Unidos [Industrial Relations In North America: Unions And The Auto Sector In The United States], Maria Lorena Cook

Maria Lorena Cook

[Excerpt] Este trabajo empieza por describir algunas de las tendencias generates de cambio que se han generado en los mercados de trabajo y en las relaciones industriales a nivel nacional en los Estados Unidos a raiz de los procesos de globalizacion en los ultimos anos, tomando como ejemplo el caso del sector automotriz. Tambien se consideran algunas de las respuestas y estrategias de los sindicatos norteamericanos frente a estos cambios: las de la AFL-CIO a nivel central, y las del sindicato del sector automotriz, el United Automobile Workers, o UAW. Los cambios que se han generado en los ultimos anos …

The Politics Of Economic Restructuring In Mexico: Actors, Sequencing, And Coalition Change, Maria Lorena Cook, Kevin J. Middlebrook, Juan Molinar Horcasitas

Maria Lorena Cook

[Excerpt] This introductory chapter addresses three topics. The first section examines the historical origins of Mexico's postrevolutionary authoritarian regime, focusing on the principal institutional and coalitional legacies of regime formation in the aftermath of the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution. It also addresses briefly the relationship between authoritarian rule and import-substituting industrialization from the 1940s through the 1970s, as well as the challenges posed by economic crisis in the 1980s. The second part of this chapter analyzes in greater detail the impact of economic crisis and restructuring on the stability of Mexico's governing coalition and the growing importance of opposition parties and …