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."

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.

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.

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.

First published in 1891, this seminal work examines the primary causes of poverty during the industrial age. Through considering how poverty is measured, the growth of urbanisation and the supply of low-skilled labour in the workforce, Hobson arrives at possible solutions to the problem of poverty and explores the ethical issues surrounding it.

This book calls upon us to rethink and reboot the European Union. The authors dissect the EU's many vulnerabilities: how some Member States are backsliding on the rule of law, freedom of the press, and control of corruption - and how globalization's 'discontents' are threatening the liberal international order. It examines the need for a common immigration policy; the need to rethink the unsustainable debt overhang of some Eurozone countries; and the need to use education to foster a European identity. Given the sum total of these vulnerabilities, the book argues, the EU may not survive beyond 2025 in its present form - that is, unless decisive action is taken. In turn, the book puts forward a number of workable solutions: a European economic model to secure full employment; a stronger European Court of Human Rights to counter systemic violations; a points-based immigration policy; clear exit options for the Eurozone; and an Open Education Area with a common second language. These solutions may reduce the number of EU countries, but would increase cohesion and overall survivability.

Expats and the Labor Force examines the flows of people and money in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. This timely book outlines the reasons that made the Gulf region a destination for millions of migrants. Taking advantage of the discovery of large hydrocarbon reserves and relatively stable political environment, the GCC countries filled the large demand for labor with foreign workers. However the number, share, and source of expatriates have presented serious challenges for the region. Naufal and Genc discuss these consequences on the composition of the labor force and remittance outflows.

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.

Poverty, famines, wars, and ethnic conflicts lead to large movements of refugees. The papers in this book provide an analysis of the economics of immigration. Junankar discusses why people migrate, the likely destinations for migrants, and their employment in the destination countries. He studies the benefits to the migrant families in terms of higher wages and living standards, and also studies how immigrants fare in the Australian labour markets in terms of finding good jobs, and whether there is discrimination against them. Economics of Immigration analyses the macroeconomic impacts of immigration on the Australian economy and discusses why some groups favour immigration while other groups are against it. Junankar argues immigration has been beneficial for employment and growth; not only adding to labour supply but also to labour demand, hence leading to favourable outcomes. This collection of essays shows how immigration has helped the economic development of Australia, while also highlighting that the historical reasons for immigration lie in the colonisation of many countries in Asia and Africa.

Trade, Markets and Welfare brings together a selection of Kelvin Lancaster's seminal work on trade under monopolistic competition and oligopoly with differentiated products, as well as recent extensions to the analysis of markets in which the characteristics of products can be varied freely. Professor Lancaster argues that protection can sometimes improve world welfare, that there can be mutual trade gains between absolutely identical economies, and that entries of an additional firm may sometimes increase industry profits. The selection also includes some of Professor Lancaster's earlier works on trade and papers on several topics related to the theory of economic policy, including second best theory, wages policy, and a simple dynamic game model of capitalist growth. Trade, Markets and Welfare complements the first volume of Kelvin J. Lancaster's selected essays - Modern Consumer Theory - by expanding applications of consumer choice theory into new areas.

A distinguished roster of contributors considers the state of the art of the field at the turn of the 21st century and charts an ambitious agenda for the future. Following what the editors describe as an evolutionist' approach to the study of labor markets, the chapters address issues of continuity and discontinuity in a wide range of topics including: markets and institutional structures; employment relations and work structures; patterns of stratification in the United States; and public policies, opportunity structures, and economic outcomes.

This book consists of a selected subset of papers presented at the International Symposium of Linked Employer-Employee Data, held in Washington DC, in May 1998 - to address the creation and analysis of such matched data in an environment that safeguards respondent confidentiality. The conference brought together a wide range of social scientists and statisticians from more than 20 countries.

Three broad themes are highlighted:
(1) The analysis of linked employer-employee data.
The basic finding of this and the next section is that the firm matters a good deal in explaining the differences in earnings, productivity, and work experiences of individual workers. Linked data allow the researcher to disentangle the firm effects from the worker effects.
(2) Econometric issues involved with the analysis of such data.
Creating and analyzing employer-employee matched data sets presents a number of new econometric problems that are not present in standard micro-data sets containing just workers or just employers. However, these data also offer us a unique opportunity to examine the effects of some of the econometric problems involved in using the other data sources. The chapters in this section address both of these issues. The first two chapters examine new econometric issues involved in the creation and use of matched data sets, while the second two chapters use matched data to examine possible problems with cross-sectional or panel data on workers. The results from each of these chapters will be valuable to all empirical researchers, regardless of whether they are using employer-employee matched data or more standard cross-sectional or panel data sets.
(3) Ongoing effortsaimed at creating large-scale linked employer-employee data.
The last section of this book describes four recent efforts at creating linked employer-employee data through surveys of firms and individuals. The first two chapters describe an "employers first" methodology of creating linked employer-employee data, and the last two chapters describe an "employees first" methodology. The two "employees first" surveys described here are, as far as known, the only two large-scale surveys in production that follow this design. Each of the four chapters in this section describes details about the design and field operation of the survey that will be indispensable to others who might want to create or analyze linked employer-employee survey data.

The 23 chapters in this book provide a glimpse into the future of labor economics and industrial organization. It can be said that labor economics and public policy around the world has been dominated over the past several decades by quantitative analyses based upon public-use US micro-data. In the future, it is very likely that economics and social policy in the United States and elsewhere will depend on quantitative analysis based on linked employer-employee micro-data currently residing in all continents of the world.

This Palgrave Pivot re-examines salary formation in Major League Baseball in light of real option theory to clarify the connection between salary and marginal revenue product for professional baseball players. Current literature has tended to treat single-year and multi-year contracts similarly, ignoring the potential option value for teams and for players. Recent work points to the observation that both high-productivity and low-productivity athletes have salaries that systematically differ from their marginal revenue product, and that free agents signing multi-year contracts are overpaid relative to free agents signing one-year contracts. This book argues that the value of signing an athlete to a contract should be determined similarly to the determination of the value of an investment project or a financial asset. This book demonstrates how to calculate the value of real options to the player and the team owner with a simple two-year contract, and offers extensions to the real options model for multiyear contracts or when a player is early or late in his career.

This book examines the nature and regulation of the informal economy by means of a collective case study in a highly regulated Western country. The book, situated at the intersection of criminology and sociology, investigates the relation between formal, informal and criminal work in three urban and rural labour markets (seasonal work, street trade and sex work) alongside the impact of state policies on informality. Boels uncovers the differential position authorities take regarding these labour markets, notwithstanding the presence of informality and often vulnerable position of workers in each one of them. With a distinctive focus on informal workers, and through in-depth interviews, this study explores the life and work of informal workers, including their experiences with regulators, their motivations for working informally and their perceptions of state policy. In short, this book gives a voice to often ignored but crucial participants of the informal economy. The detailed discussion of the results and the links to theoretical frameworks will ensure this book is of particular interest to scholars of urban economics and governance, criminology, and sociology.

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.

This book focuses on the implications of the South African labour market dynamics including labour market reforms and fiscal policy for monetary policy and financial stability. Evidence suggests there are benefits in adopting an approach that coordinates labour market policies and reforms, fiscal policy, price and financial stability. In particular, the benefits of coordinating policies present policymakers with policy options in cases where they are confronted by binding policy trade-offs and dilemmas, such as in cases when there is divergence in price and financial and economic growth outcomes. The empirical insights and policy recommendations are based on different techniques that include the counterfactual and endogenous-exogenous approaches, non-linearities introduced by thresholds and the impact of persistent and transitory shock effects. Themes covered in the book include various aspects of labour market conditions and reforms and their link to inflation and inflation expectations, the impact of the national minimum wage, the interaction between public and private sector wage inflation, economic policy uncertainty and employment, government debt thresholds, sovereign yields and debt ratings downgrades, labour productivity, the impact of inflation regimes on expansionary fiscal and monetary policy multipliers, the increase in government cost of funding on price and financial stability and the link between fiscal policy and credit dynamics.

Japanese Workplaces in Transition explores the changes in workplaces from the perspective of employees. It provides new insights by contrasting survey and theoretical sources with excerpts from blogs published by Japanese people on the Internet. In their blogsthey describe what happened to them or colleagues at work, reflect about the development of their careers or voice future ambitions and concerns. Bringing together three major developments in Japanese companies -restructuring, changing incentive systems and evaluation principles, and the increasing use of contingent workers -it shows how these developments have affected the mindsets of Japanese employees, eventually leading to a new paradigm of work in Japan.

This volume is a theoretical and empirical examination of human resource growth and change in postwar Puerto Rico. The study is empirically based, but emphasis is given to econometric results as opposed to econometric methods. The main concern is with issues of economic efficiency. In particular, the book focuses on efficiency in the use of human resources during rapid industrialization. Nonetheless, Santiago subscribes to the notion that economic growth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic development. Understanding the larger historical and social processes that encompass economic development requires drawing together, in a multidisciplinary way, information from diverse fields and methodologies. This work helps us to better understand the process of economic development, thus providing directions for practical solutions to the pressing economic problems faced by the majority of the population of the planet.

Much of the critique of the Puerto Rican development strategy is based on its negative impact on income distribution and the fact that it promotes dependency on the United States. This book concludes that, despite its focus on economic growth and rapid industrialization, Puerto Rico's use of resources has been less than optimal, and that on efficiency grounds, the Puerto Rican development model offers some successes but significant errors for developing nations. This work examines those successes and errors and will instruct both economists and policy makers in development economics, labor economics, and Latin American studies.

"Wages for Caring" examines policies and programs of compensation for family caregivers of the disabled elderly from a broad analytical perspective, weighing current policies of home care services against principles of access, equity, quality, and funding of long-term care. Linsk, Keigher, Simon-Rusinowitz, and England challenge widely held assumptions that currently hold the family responsible for care, and accept the government's role in deterring or delaying institutionalization. The authors focus on programs and policies that already exist which could be adjusted to include families and to promote support of family caregiving. In assessing the potential of broad implementation of wages for caring, they contend that if implemented appropriately, family compensation may offer benefits not available through any other kind of service system.

First, the authors review incentives to family care and services to families providing home care, and include an overview of attendance allowance and caregiver compensation programs in other developed countries. Next, they present several original studies in an integrated format to allow for the analysis of pros and cons of several compensated family care programs. Third, they examine provisions of Medicaid programs at the state level, as well as provisions of the aging network and their potential to complement family care. The focus is largely on poor clients and families, for whom the burden of care has the most relevant costs in terms of potential government liability. Finally, the authors develop consumer centered criteria to evaluate policy and program provisions, with special attention to the special needs of low-income elderly and their families. Wages for Caring will prove particularly useful to public policymakers, social workers, gerontologists, and researchers.

An increasing number of landings of illegal migrants on the coast of Italy and Spain, but also the recent riots, car-burnings, and street battles that occurred all across France and that have been attributed to the migrant community, seem to indicate that migration is likely to stay high on the European policy agenda for some time. The flow of migrants from poor to rich countries does not, however, constitute a typically European problem. V. S. public policy has also been facing a continued (legal and illegal) inflow of labor from different regions, notably Mexico and other Latin American countries. And similar developments in other advanced countries (Australia, Canada) as weil as in selected fast-growing emerging markets in Eastern Europe and East Asia imply that these countries too are being compelled to adjust their public policies in order to relieve migratory pressures and deal with their consequences. The world economy already saw rising cross-border labor flows in the 1990s and most forecasts predict that South-North and South-South migration will re main at relatively high levels over the next decades and possibly even turn into a major global challenge for policy makers in the 21st century."

Relocation is a fact of business life today. For many good business reasons organisations move to new areas and ask their employees to relocate with them. Also during staff training and the handling of subsidiary operations companies may require individuals to work in another part of the country, or even abroad. Managing Relocation, the first complete account of employee relocation, provides a practical approach to the questions and problems that arise during any relocation exercise. What financial and other assistance should organisations offer their employees? How can the pitfalls of employment law be avoided? Is special action required when staff are asked to work overseas? What are the tax consequences of relocation in the UK and abroad? Here is a book for all organisations which relocate staff regularly and for newcomers to the subject. Susan Shortland has written an invaluable guide for all those involved in moving people - from personnel and industrial relations managers to professional specialists in relocation and removals.

A companion to the editor's previous volume, "Communicating Employee Responsibilities and RightS," this book summarizes the current state of knowledge in the area of employee responsibilities and rights and points to future directions for research and practice. The contributors examine the theory behind employee rights and responsibilities and suggest the need for a shift from discipline-specific orientations to the development of an interdisciplinary paradigm. They emphasize the need to look at rights and responsibilities issues from a broad management context and examine the management of the various issues in modern organizations. Detailed case studies of programs that have worked well, short case examples, court decisions, and quantified data document specific ideas throughout the book.

The book is divided into four sections, beginning with two introductory essays. Three chapters follow that address legal issues such as legislation to protect against unjust discharge, the current status of wrongful dismissal legislation, and trends in Title VII discrimination legal theories. In the next seven chapters that address human resources and management education perspectives, the contributors treat topics involving positive discipline, internal mechanisms for resolving employee complaints, the ombudsman model of managing employee rights, whistleblowing, and the responsibilities of management education to help fulfill the rights of students and future business leaders. The concluding section contains two chapters and examines whether employee rights strategies are desired or required and develops a social constructionist and political economic perspective of employee rights. Taken together, these chapters offer the most comprehensive exposition of this complex subject available to date.

Foregrounding African women's ingenuity and labor, this pioneering case study shows how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises, and postcolonial rule. By advocating for an understanding of rural Malian women as engineers, Laura Ann Twagira rejects the persistent image of African women as subjects without technological knowledge or access and instead reveals a hidden history about gender, development, and improvisation. In so doing, she also significantly expands the scope of African science and technology studies. Using the Office du Niger agricultural project as a case study, Twagira argues that women used modest technologies (such as a mortar and pestle or metal pots) and organized female labor to create, maintain, and reengineer a complex and highly adaptive food production system. While women often incorporated labor-saving technologies into their work routines, they did not view their own physical labor as the problem it is so often framed to be in development narratives. Rather, women's embodied techniques and knowledge were central to their ability to transform a development project centered on export production into an environmental resource that addressed local taste and consumption needs.

Although Japanese economic development is often discussed, less attention is given to social development, and much less to gender related issues. By examining Japanese experiences related to gender, the authors seek insights relevant to the current developing countries. Simultaneously, the book points out the importance for Japanese society to draw lessons from the creativity and activism of women in developing countries.