Birth rates are dropping to ever-lower levels around the world. Populations are growing more slowly and, in some cases, beginning to decline. Rapid population aging has begun in the West and parts of Asia and is just over the horizon elsewhere. The demographic changes, their economic implications, and possible policy responses are the subject matter of this volume. What will be the effects on economic performance? How can couples be encouraged to marry and have children? Can educational reform lead to a more productive young labor force helping to offset their meager numbers? Can labor market reform extend the work life of older workers without damaging the interests of others? How should the social safety net that supports the elderly evolve in ways that are both fair and sustainable? The papers in this volume draw on international experience to address these issues, but emphasize the experience of Japan the country with the world's oldest population. It includes contributors such as: Noriko Aoki, Akira Kawaguchi, Allen Kelley, Wei Huang, Robert Hutchens, Tomoko Kinugasa, Andrew Mason, Naoki Mitani, Takashi Oshio, Robert Schmidt, and Mitoshi Yamaguchi.

ELLENBALKA Simon Fraser University ebalka@Sfu. ca 1. INTRODUCTION In developing the call for papers for the 7th International Federation of Information Processors (IFIP) Women, Work and Computerization Conference, we sought to cast our net widely. We wanted to encourage presenters to think broadly about women, work and computerization. Towards this end, the programme committee developed a call for papers that, in its final form, requested paper submissions around four related themes. These are (1) Setting the Course: Taking Stock of Where We Are and Where We're Going; (2) Charting Undiscovered Terrain: Creating Models, Tools and Theories; (3) Navigating the Unknown: Sex, Time, Space and Place, and (4) Taking the Helm: Education and Pedagogy. Our overall conference theme, 'Charting a Course to the Future' was inspired in part by Vancouver's geography, which is both coastal and mountainous. As such, navigation plays an important part in the lives of many as we seek to enjoy our environs. In addition, as the first Women, Work and Computerization conference of the new millennium, we hoped to encourage the broad community of scholars that has made past Women, Work and Computerization conferences a success to actively engage in imagining--and working towards-- a better future for women in relation to computers. The contributions to this volume are both a reflection of the hard work undertaken by many to improve the situation of women in relation to computerization, and a testament to how much work is yet to be done.

Increasingly policy makers are focusing on the importance of skills and lifelong learning. The reason for this is that workers with sufficient and up-to-date skills are more productive and have more potential to remain employed. However, the processes that influence skill obsolescence, have largely been neglected in labor economics.

It was in the 1990s that skill issues came to the top of the agenda, because of the general awareness of the rapid technological developments that affect the demand for human capital. Although the analysis of skill-biased technological change is at the heart of this debate, in recent years, the literature has become wider than simple consideration of this aspect and has started to embrace other causes of obsolescence.

The papers in this volume are selected from the papers presented at a conference on Understanding Skills Obsolescence. They advance both the theoretical and empirical understanding of the causes and the effects of skills obsolescence.

Since the beginning of the economic crisis of the 1980s considerable research has been dedicated to the study of the unemployment problem. Nevertheless, the phenomenon has not become fully understood, nor are its consequences adequately prevented. In this important new volume, On the Mysteries of Unemployment, economists and social scientists come together to offer the reader the latest insights on unemployment and policies regarding unemployment from the perspectives of both disciplines. On the Mysteries of Unemployment contains four main sections. Part One provides an introductory chapter and general overview. Part Two contains rich contributions that provide new insights from an economic science perspective, while Part Three offers a balanced view from social scientists. The final section is devoted to the examination of policy issues concerning unemployment. This volume, unique in its field, will be of interest to researchers, students, politicians and policy-makers.

This book presents conceptual tools and theoretical perspectives that can be used to sociologically analyze labour markets in modern capitalist societies. It makes use of the rich heritage of sociological thinking and draws on the classical work of Marx, Weber and Durkheim as well as structural-functionalist contributions. Contemporary sociological thinking is criticized for its tendency to exaggerate change in labour markets while the need to consider continuity is emphasized. Conceptual tools and perspectives are applied based on concrete phenomena, as the author combines abstract theoretical reasoning with theoretically founded reflections on actual labour market developments.

This text presents the outcomes of a major 14-country project aimed at empowering girls and young women. It provides a discussion of their choices in life, comparing factors such as family background, health, education, employment opportunities and the use of and access to the internet.

Regulatory reform represents a major shift in the government's role toward price determination in the transportation and telecommunication industries. The resulting policy emphasizes dependence on market forces to set prices and to encourage efficient production techniques. While extensive research investigates the influence of deregulation on prices, profits and productivity, the effect on labor markets has not received the same scrutiny. Firms in these industries are of major importance to business operations in other industries because they provide the critical services of transporting goods and transmitting information. This may partly explain such extensive research on the product market aspects of regulatory reform. Examining labor markets in the transportation and telecommunications industries is also highly warranted, as historically these industries represented some of the most heavily unionized sectors in the economy. The extent to which regulatory reform has encouraged product market competition may not necessarily result in the same degree of competition across industries. Regulatory Reform and Labor Markets debates the notion that research on regulatory reform and labor markets should develop within the framework of the competitive model. This is achieved by presenting diverging views on wage and employment determination in distinctly different deregulated industries.

Selected by Princeton University as Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics for 2010.

Are immigrants from the new EU member states a threat to the Western welfare state? Do they take jobs away from the natives? And will the source countries suffer from severe brain drain or demographic instability? In a timely and unprecedented contribution, this book integrates what is known about post-enlargement migration and its effects on EU labor markets. Based on rigorous analysis and hard data, it makes a convincing case that there is no evidence that the post-enlargement labor migrants would on aggregate displace native workers or lower their wages, or that they would be more dependent on welfare. While brain drain may be a concern in the source countries, the anticipated brain circulation between EU member states may in fact help to solve their demographic and economic problems, and improve the allocative efficiency in the EU. The lesson is clear: free migration is a solution rather than a foe for labor market woes and cash-strapped social security systems in the EU.

En el contexto de la globalizacion economica los mercados laborales han ido sufriendo transformaciones en sus procesos de administracion, organizacion y empleabilidad. De ahi que la interrogante que orienta la presente publicacion es como se ubican los profesionistas en el mercado laboral flexible y cuales son las competencias que le son requeridas en el acceso al mismo?. El libro integra en sus capitulos elementos conceptuales, caracteristicas, clasificacion y enfoques sobre flexibilidad laboral y competencias profesionales, describe las caracteristicas de los mercados laborales flexibles y las competencias profesionales que en la actualidad se demandan tomando como objeto de estudio a los profesionistas de dos consultorias con caracteristicas de flexibilidad laboral. Otra parte sustantiva del libro lo constituyen los aportes teoricos explicativos del campo de la economia de la educacion que estudian la relacion entre la educacion y el empleo y se incorporan las nuevas interpretaciones surgidas en el contexto de la nueva economia de la educacion. Los capitulos finales recuperan los elementos teorico-metodologicos del diseno de competencias de los enfoques vinculados al analisis ocupacional, constructivista, funcional y complejo, lo que posibilita el diseno de una propuesta para la identificacion y definicion de competencias emergentes relevantes aplicables en las profesiones objeto de estudio.

First published in 1985, this book examines the major components of working time from an international perspective, considering the individual aspects of working time, with particular emphasis on the argument that work should be shared to alleviate unemployment and the case for further increasing the flexibility and choice in working arrangements. Paul Blyton reviews working time since the Industrial Revolution, when a strict time-frame was first imposed on workers, and the growth in work-sharing, flexitime, part-time working and changes to the retirement age.

Poverty is a paradoxical state. Recognizable in the eld for any sensitive observer who travels in remote rural areas and urban slums and meets marginalized people in a given society, poverty still remains a challenge to conceptual formalization and to measurement that is consistent with such formalization. The analysis of poverty is multidisciplinary. It goes from ethics to economics, from political science to human biology, and any type of measurement rests on mathematics. Moreover, poverty is multifaceted according to the types of deprivation, and it is also gender and age speci c. A vector of variables is required, which raises a substantial problem for individual and group comparisons necessary to equity analysis. Multidimension- ity also complicates the aggregation necessary to perform the ef ciency analysis of policies. In the case of income poverty, these two problems, equity and ef ciency, have bene ted from very signi cant progress in the eld of economics. Similar achievements are still to come in the area of multidimensional poverty. Within this general background, this book has a very modest and narrow-scoped objective. It proposes an operational methodology for measuring multidimensional poverty, independent from the conceptual origin, the size and the qualitative as well as the quantitative nature of the primary indicators used to describe the poverty of an individual, a household or a sociodemographic entity.

1. 1 INTRODUCTION The final chapter of my Personal Income Distribution, a Hulticapability Theory (Hartog, 1981a) carried as its motto: 'Oh richness of the unfinished'. It concluded a book in which labor services were decomposed into services arising from different capabilities. Individuals were supposed to command stocks of capabilities and to decide on the utilization rates of these capabilities, by balanc ing efforts and rewards. The optimal capability bundle they so defined was to be realized by picking the job that just required this bundle. To derive analytical implications on the structure of the labor market and on the distribution of labor earnings, the key assumption was made that arbitrage in capability supply was possible, i. e., that effectively capabilities could be sold separ ately and carried a uniform unit price throughout the labor market. While many interesting analytical and empirical results followed, there was also an indication from empirical testing that an earnings function linear in capabilities could be outperformed by a non-linear func- 2 CAPABILITIES, ALLOCATION AND EARNINGS tion, and that the arbitrage assumption might be un tenable. This book attempts to harvest a little from the richness of the unfinished that was left. It returns to some of the old topics and adds some new ones, in a more general model that no longer imposes the assumption that capabilities can be treated as if they can be unbundled. It also draws on new datasets to explore the issues empirically."

Ernest Aves (1857-1917) was an influential social analyst and civil servant. This title, first published in 1907, during Aves' work for the Board of Trade, investigates the different forms of industrial co-operation within Britain; the fundamental principle of this is stated as "equitable association", leading to increased profitability and the strengthening of industry. Chapters discuss such areas as centralisation, co-operative production and co-operative agriculture. This interesting reissue will be of particular value to students of economics with an interest in co-operative industry and the history of economic thought.

As more and more mothers of young children have entered the work force in America, the question of child care has become a major issue among employers, scholars, policymakers and, of course, the general public. The accepted view among those who see a high rate of female labor force participation as inevitable has long been to achieve a consistent maternal/parenting leave of approximately six months, followed by access to good quality child care facilities for use at parental option. Some European countries are, however, now going beyond this point by financially enabling parents to stay at home for one, two, or even three years after childbirth. Sheila Kamerman and Alfred Kahn explore with European scholars child care and parenting policies in six countries, and examine the motives and perspectives involved, the specific problems and their costs, the extent to which countries can report the impacts of their methods, and the potential implications of these experiences for the United States.

Through these national examples, the editors introduce an important policy debate concerning parenting and children under three. Among the questions raised are whether the government should make it financially easier for parents to remain at home, what the effects of leave policy would be on need for and use of child care facilities, what the relationships between such assistance and the broader income support policies would be and--ultimately--what the consequences of such policies might be for parents and children. The editors begin their work with an introductory chapter that defines the issues for the United States and the reasons for looking toward Europe, and follow with six chapters examining the policies of countries in the lead in this field: Austria, Germany, France, Hungary, Finland, and Sweden. The book concludes with a final chapter that suggests possible directions for U.S. policy. This work will be an important resource for planners and for courses in sociology, family studies, early childhood education, and social policy, as well as for public, corporate, and academic libraries.

Focusing on organization, resistance and political culture, this collection represents some of the best examples of recent Spanish historiography in the field of modern Spanish labor movements. Topics range from socialism to anarchism, from the formation of the liberal state in the 19th century to the Civil War, and from women in the work place to the fate of the unions under Franco.

Rapid economic changes throughout the world economy offer new possibilities for economic development. Yet the multitude of people in an impoverished underclass often find the burst of economic development in their country continues to exclude them. As technologies and demographics reshape economies, the underclass finds its skills increasingly peripheral to the urban economy into which it is drawn. The daunting task before Mexico in raising the living standards of its people is carefully analyzed with the help of economic theory. The current focus on Mexico and Latin America since the passage of NAFTA makes this a particularly relevant book for economists and readers interested in labor, international topics, and in Mexico.

As the world economy becomes more integrated, products become more globalized. Airplanes, automobiles, computers, watches, and garments are among products whose constituent parts are made all over the world. This volume presents arguments and evidence showing that this process is benign: it raises competitiveness, creates jobs, and enhances economic welfare.

First published in 1981, Labour Market Economics develops the basic economic theory of introductory courses within the context of labour market analysis and applies it both to particular features and special problems of the subject. The author begins by outlining the nature of the area and the structure of the UK labour market at the time, and proceeds to explain and elaborate the tools of theoretical analysis. These are then applied in subsequent chapters to a variety of issues, including the economic analysis of trade unions, collective bargaining and the effects of unions, unemployment, wage inflation and the inequality of pay. Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on the economic theory of the labour market and the role of empirical work in testing its predictions, and wherever available, evidence from studies of the UK labour markets is cited.

R. Paul Shaw has travelled widely in the Arab world, obtaining data and gathering impressions first-hand from national and local planners. In this book, he identifies population and manpower problems that are likely to become more serious and more difficult to solve if they are neglected at this early stage of Arab development. He focuses on five broad areas which are directly or indirectly related to mobilizing human resources, and his book will be of special interest to all those who are concerned with such issues as population, migration, employment, inequality, the emancipation of women, construction and agriculture. Dr Shaw proposes policy directives which are sensitive to the problems as they are seen by the Arab governments themselves, and sets out practical guidelines which can be used by Arab planners and policy-makers. An important feature of the book with respect to current literature on Arab development is that it moves away from a preoccupation with growth-related investments to a concentration on development-related population, manpower and employment issues. By bringing together such comprehensive empirical and bibliographic information, it will also be invaluable as a reference source for some twenty Arab countries. First published in 1983.

This book examines international migration, security and border-management strategies in Asia, in the face of intensified transnational economic and social processes and the expanding governmental regime. It argues that state policy to migrants is increasingly shaped by, and responds to challenges such as border security, international agreements, and new norms of global governnace developed by NGOs and other international advocacy organizations. This volume will contribute to important debates about globalization, international migration and issues of cross-border movements, and inform debates on issues of security, governance and population movements in the Asia-Pacific region.

The great inter-war depression has long been seen as an unprecedented economic disaster for the peoples of the non-European world. This book, with its detailed assessment of the impact of the depression on the economies of Africa and Asia, challenges the orthodox view, and is essential reading for those with a teaching or research interest in the modern economic history of those continents. Established specialists in the modern economic history of parts of Africa or Asia put forward a number of revisionist arguments. They show that some economies were left essentially unscathed by the depression, and that for many export-dependent peasant communities which did face a severe drop in cash income as world commodity prices collapsed from the late 1920s, there was a range of important responses and reactions by which they could defend their economic welfare. For many peasant communities the depression was not a disaster but an opportunity.

This book represents an advance in our knowledge of the labour market. For the first time it combines the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data to produce an explanation of the main changes which have transformed the labour market during the recession. For the first time it demonstrates the segmented character of the youth labour market and the significance of the local labour markets. The result is a substantial contribution to labour market segmentation theory and to the analysis of social policy in this field.