The rapid growth of offshore outsourcing in manufacturing and IT-based services is unleashing dramatic changes around the world. This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners to analyze the implications of this huge transformation. For some observers, offshore outsourcing promises more rapid economic growth for both developed and developing countries. For others, it unravels the social contract in today's rich countries, as labor and governments lose bargaining power vis-a-vis globally mobile capital. For yet others, it offers some developing countries the opportunity to leapfrog, while pushing others even further to the sidelines. This book provides a uniquely comprehensive, yet diverse account of the winners and losers from offshore outsourcing and of how policy might be used to spread its benefits more widely and equally.

Empirical and mathematically rigorous, this book provides a study of the economics of prostitution rather than focusing on the sociological and cultural themes. Using economic tools of analysis, internationally based editors have put together a theoretically informed volume that explores the supply and demand of prostitution.

Prostitution is a globalized industry involving millions of workers and it is characterized by a high degree of inequality in working conditions (ranging from slavery to self-managed and legalized unionized employment), by different sub-markets and fully integrated in the productive system.

Taking a provocative approach to prostitution, this book is a must read for students and researchers in the area of gender and economics.

This book analyzes the everyday lives of labour migrants in a rapidly developing city-state. Using the emirate of Dubai as a case study, Migrant Dubai shows that even within highly restrictive mobility regimes, marginalized migrants find ways to cope with structural inequalities and quotidian modes of discrimination.

This authoritative book, bringing together the reports of the Competitiveness Advisory Group, identifies actions to improve European competitiveness politically, economically and socially. The objective is to raise living standards and maintain social cohesion. The Competitiveness Advisory Group has the mission of advising the European Commission and the Heads of State and Government of the European Union. The members of this independent group, which includes leading industrialists, trade unionists, politicians and academics, have adopted a 'bottom-up' approach, seeking to draw lessons from the experience of countries, industries and firms: they rely on 'benchmarking' in order to identify best practice. In the context of increasing interdependence of world trade and consequent globalization of the international economy new policy prescriptions are required for growth and employment, greater efficiency and higher standards of living. In relation to this, the Group discusses the need to close the worldwide technology gap, for Europe to develop deeper relations with the fast growing Asia Pacific region and argues for greater European solidarity in international trade negotiations. Within the European Union itself, it emphasizes the need to achieve the internal market for the free flow of goods, services and people. In addition, it stresses that Europe needs to catch-up, construct and eventually lead the development of the information society in which workers are recognized as a major asset to be invested in. The Group concludes that, although unemployment remains high, European competitiveness now has a brighter future with the movement towards economic and monetary union, and the enlargement of the European Union eastwards. This book will be essential reading for policymakers, government advisers, industrialists and academics concerned with the future of European economies and societies.

The vision of a 'new' international division of labour, involving relocation of 'traditional' industrial activities to the Third World and specialisation in 'high-technology' industries by developed countries is an attractive one. But critics respond that this vision conceals the reality of heightened exploitation in the former and industrial and geographic decline in the latter. However, critical approaches are sometimes vitiated by economistic, functionalist and determinist arguments. Because of the potential they offer to overcome these conceptual dilemmas, French regulation theories have attracted attention among scholars from diverse disciplines. This book assesses the implications of French regulation theories for our understanding of the concept of the international division of labour. It distinguishes the Parisian approach, represented by Michel Aglietta and Alain Lipietz, from the Grenoble school. It is based on a thorough study of the French literature and on interviews with the major theorists. For English-language readers, the book offers an excellent introduction to Francophone debates in international political economy.

This significant book explains how work-life balance is being destroyed because individuals fail to link their work effort with its adverse environmental effects and the personal costs they impose. The burgeoning literature dealing with work-life balance suggests that the developed world is more interested in this issue today than at any other time in the recent past. Provocative and insightful, Work, Leisure and the Environment presents a rigorous explanation based on economic theory as to why contemporary societies suffer from over-work and work-life imbalance, asserting that they are both the cause and effect of environmental degradation. The author focuses upon a fundamental flaw in contemporary market economies that causes individuals to unknowingly reduce their well-being by working and consuming excessively, while enjoying inadequate leisure time. It is argued that this inability to correctly assess the benefits derived from their work effort causes individuals to place unreasonable and unsustainable demands on the environment. By ignoring the environmental destruction that accompanies work effort, its benefits are overestimated and, as a consequence, individuals voluntarily choose to work longer hours than they should. This engaging volume will have widespread appeal amongst researchers and policymakers interested in the environment, consumerism and labour markets and will also be an invaluable reference tool for studies into leisure and work-life balance.

High unemployment rates in the period of an internationalization of economies and an intensified technological competition are the main problems that exist in most EU countries. Taking stock of unemployment patterns, technological trends and employment opportunities in the EU and the US is crucial for the reform debate in Europe. In continental Europe, major problems are an insufficient creation of new firms in innovative technology fields, inadequate labor market developments and inconsistent R&D policies. Founded on new data evaluations, the book presents an innovative analysis of these topics and shows opportunities for reforms.

The book provides a thorough but concise exposure to macroeconomics to post school students as well as those studying economics for the first time. Following an introduction that gives an overview of macroeconomics as well as a brief discussion of the main macroeconomic problems that societies face, the book then looks at national income accounting and economic performance. The book looks at the unemployment problem. There is also a discussion of aggregate supply and demand theory, and the role of that theory in explaining the determinants of aggregate economic output and employment. The problem of inflation and is also discussed. The reality that the economies of most countries are interconnected with that of the rest of the world is discussed under open-economy. The book then discusses economic growth in both the short-run and the long run.

New technologies, global markets and increased competitive pressures mean that companies are having to reinvent themselves, reappraise their competitive strategies and rethink the ways in which they organize business activities. This timely book illustrates how changes in strategy can translate into organizational changes within the firm itself and can influence the relationship between the firm and their employees and collaborators. The authors provide a broad theoretical and empirical assessment of these complex changes, their effect on the nature of employment, and the consequences for both employers and employees. They develop a framework that encompasses the interaction between the strategic reactions of businesses to a changing environment and the restrictions imposed by social institutions. A key theme of the book is that we are now living in an age of transition where concepts such as job security, which have played a crucial role in society, are no longer valid. Indeed, the importance of the research presented in the book is underlined by the social and political implications such changes will undoubtedly bring. Significantly, the authors view the subject matter from an interdisciplinary perspective applying tools from the fields of organizational behavior, sociology and psychology. Social economists, employment analysts, business managers, and scholars of strategic management and organizational studies will value this integrated assessment of the challenges and changes facing modern firms.

Equal opportunity is a powerful idea, and one with extremely broad appeal in contemporary politics, political theory, and law. But what does it mean? On close examination, the most attractive existing conceptions of equal opportunity turn out to be impossible to achieve in practice, or even in theory. As long as families are free to raise their children differently, no two people's opportunities will be equal; nor is it possible to disentangle someone's abilities or talents from her background advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, given different abilities and disabilities, different people need different opportunities, confounding most ways of imagining what counts as "equal." This book proposes an entirely new way of thinking about the project of equal opportunity. Instead of focusing on the chimera of literal equalization, we ought to work to broaden the range of opportunities open to people at every stage in life. We can achieve this in part by loosening the bottlenecks that constrain access to opportunities-the narrow places through which people must pass in order to pursue many life paths that open out on the other side. A bottleneck might be a test like the SAT, a credential requirement like a college degree, or a skill like speaking English. It might be membership in a favored caste or racial group. Bottlenecks are part of the opportunity structure of every society. But their severity varies. By loosening them, we can build a more open and pluralistic opportunity structure in which people have more of a chance, throughout their lives, to pursue paths they choose for themselves-rather than those dictated by limited opportunities. This book develops this idea and other elements of opportunity pluralism, then applies this approach to several contemporary egalitarian policy problems: class and access to education, workplace flexibility and work/family conflict, and antidiscrimination law.

This book is concerned with the ways in which the problem of security is thought about and promoted by a range of actors and agencies in the public, private and nongovernmental sectors. The authors are concerned not simply with the influence of risk-based thinking in the area of security, but seek rather to map the mentalities and practices of security found in a variety of sectors, and to understand the ways in which thinking from these sectors influence one another. Their particular concern is to understand the drivers of innovation in the governance of security, the conditions that make innovation possible and the ways in which innovation is imagined and realised by actors from a wide range of sectors. The book has two key themes: first, governance is now no longer simply shaped by thinking within the state sphere, for thinking originating within the business and community spheres now also shapes governance, and influence one another. Secondly, these developments have implications for the future of democratic values as assumptions about the traditional role of government are increasingly challenged. The first five chapters of the book explore what has happened to the governance of security, through an analysis of the drivers, conditions and processes of innovation in the context of particular empirical developments. Particular reference is made here to 'waves of change' in security within the Ontario Provincial Police in Canada. In the final chapter the authors examine the implications of 'nodal governance' for democratic values, and then suggest normative directions for deepening democracy in these new circumstances.

This volume is a collection of selected papers using the framework of inframarginal analysis of the division of labour held at Monash University on 6-7 July 2001. This framework, pioneered mainly by Professor Xiaokai Yang, (with joint researches involving all the three editors and many of the authors), has been recommended by Professor James Buchanan (Nobel Laureate in Economics) as the most important analysis in economics in the world today.

This book shows that basic income is a powerful tool for realizing economic justice in our modern society. Through an interdisciplinary investigation of basic income in Korea, involving theological and social scientific perspectives, the book covers the topic of basic income on an academic basis, an economic basis, and in terms of its institutionalization potential.Although modern society is a global one, centered on the economic ideology of neo-liberalism, the negative effects of social polarization caused by this are quite severe. It is also urgent to come up with alternative solutions to the problems of labor reduction and wage labor. Moreover, the expansion of productivity through collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence also presents a challenge. An interdisciplinary study on the meaning and restructuring of labor is therefore needed. This book traces themes supporting the concept of basic income appearing in the Old and New Testaments, as well as precedents relating to basic income in the context of capitalism in the thought of the Reformers. Within the framework of Christian ethics, the book looks at the ideological basis for basic income and its applicability to the current situation in order to pursue economic justice. Additionally, the book examines the practical feasibility and rationale for basic income by discussing the economics of basic income financing and the political economy implications for how it can be applied to real politics.

How do workers fare in a continually changing labor market? This volume contains fifteen original scientific papers each examining how socio-economic changes affect worker wellbeing. Among the findings are: most increases in female labor force participation occur among women with high husbands' earnings, dispelling the myth that shrinking husbands' relative earnings cause women's work activities to rise; increased globalization equalizes pay between but expands pay within corporate establishments; high quality colleges widen the earnings distribution for top earners but only negligibly affect earnings for low wage earners; mathematical success depends on school quality more so than verbal learning; and adult daughters who visit ailing parents daily in a nursing home decrease their annual labor supply by about 1,000 hours implying a welfare loss of 180,000 dollars. Findings are: physical and/or sexual abuse appear to afflict over 30 per cent of the population leading to a 15 per cent drop in employment probability and a 32 per cent loss in wages; and, training workers in an entirely new occupation raises an employee's wage growth while training workers in the same occupation decreases their wage growth, at least during the Russian economy's recent transition.

This essential student resource is the first of its kind to study this period. Working chronologically from the early 1840s up to the end of the twentieth century, it examines over 150 years of women's employment history and the struggles they have faced.
With suggestions for research topics, an annotated bibliography to aid further research and a chronology of important events which places the subject in a broader historical context, Gerry Holloway considers how factors such as class, age, marital status, race and locality, along with wider economic and political issues, have affected women's job opportunities and status.
Key themes and issues that run through the book include:
* continuity and change
* the sexual division of labor
* women as a cheap labor force
* women's perceived primary role of motherhood
* women and trade unions
* equality and difference
* education and training.
Students of women's studies, gender studies and history will find this a fascinating and invaluable addition to their reading material.

With the financial crisis and Great Recession, some economists have begun to question the orthodox approach to production and capital/labor relations over the last two to three decades. This orthodoxy has been thrown into question due to concerns of poor corporate decision-making, corporate capture of regulators, perceived rewards for failure, and uneven productivity growth. But a new spirit of introspection and doubt about orthodox approaches has created some impetus leading to greater interest in themes, such as worker ownership, sharing rewards, co-operatives, and employee involvement practices which feature heavily in the "Advances" series. This "new spirit" is apparent for all to see in the 12 contributions to this volume of "Advances" which cover co-operatives; effects of worker participation on firm performance; the diffusion of high involvement management practices; and outcomes for workers (i.e., job satisfaction and wages).

Thisbook is the fruit of a number of years of assimilating another culture and learning about the evolution of its institutions, altogether an incr- iblyrich andrewarding experience. Ihopetopassonto the reader some of that richness in the belief that, even in a "globalizing" context, learning about other nations and cultures is more and more necessary. The reasons andvalues behind this belief are perhaps evident, but I amconvincedthat they bear repeating here. To begin with, the hasty generalizations that often liebehind the cynicism-and ultimately the violence-of ethnocentrism and xe- phobia are still being aired today and still need to be fought, even in "unified and advanced" regions of the world like Europe and the United States. The historical and social sciences disciplines need to be solicited constantly in this combat, even though they themselves are terrains of controversy and contestation. I personally have not lost faith in their "progressive" potential and character. Second, my belief is that only through this process of appeal to these disciplines and their findings can we resist a dangerous contemporary slide into simplisticand sensation- ist pictures of the world-viewpoints often associated with an implicit assumption that social and economic change are linear processes, so- how unfolding according to the same neat "logic" wherever they are at work.

The conventional wisdom that political and economic actors in colonial countries are passive and reactive is undermined by Goldberg's close examination of the decisions and calculations of leading political and economic actors. Goldberg shows how critical decisions affecting Egypt's integration into the world economy were based on clear understandings of what policies were most likely to advance the interests of leading interest groups, with results that continue to bedevil Egypt's political economy today. Drawing on core concepts in political economy, Goldberg focuses on how Egyptian cotton growers decided to invest in the development of product reputation, developed institutions to protect that reputation, and engaged in coalition politics to protect their interests. The result was a heavy reliance on child labour and thus the failure to provide education and skills necessary for economic development, undermining subsequent attempts to industrialize Egypt and move it away from the production of primary goods. This is a tale of paradoxes and unintended consequences of rational action.

Proponents of free trade routinely argue that an important benefit for developing countries is that it provides significant economic opportunities for their asset-less workers. By now, virtually all developing countries, have moved towards integrating themselves more closely with the international economy. To what extent have workers actually benefited from this integration? The Impact of Trade on Labor attempts to piece together broad-based evidence on the effects of trade liberalization on labor markets in developing countries in general, and selected countries from developing Asia in particular. The analysis of the available evidence takes into account the recent theoretical advances in this area.

The volume consists of nine substantive chapters separated into two parts. A main contribution of the first part is to use a blend of both theory and empirics to point out that the impact of trade liberalization on labor markets, including adjustment costs, depends in important ways on domestic labor market regulations and the nature of competition or market structure. Part I of the volume also presents a detailed discussion on the issue of labor standards, including whether trade access should be linked to a country's labor standards.

The second part of the volume moves on to a consideration of various related issues in three large and labor intensive countries, China, India and Indonesia. The approach taken in these studies is to focus on a specific issue of interest and examine this issue carefully for one country using available data. Thus the chapter on China examines the linkages between foreign direct investment and domestic labor standards; the Indonesia chapterassesses the relationship between trade and wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers; and the chapter on India focuses more broadly on how trade liberalization has impacted employment in the manufacturing sector, paying special attention to the issue of labor market regulations.

Canada and the countries of Latin America are in the midst of major changes and choices in the area of labor markets and related social policy. These decisions are likely to have profound consequences for the quality of life of workers throughout the hemisphere. Labor Market Policies in Canada and Latin America: Challenges of the New Millennium reviews the evidence of Canada and Latin America on three major labor policy instruments - unemployment insurance, minimum wages and training - and on the effects of the payroll taxes which are the main means of funding the unemployment insurance system and other components of social expenditure. This is the first study attempting an in-depth comparison of these labor policy instruments between Canada and Latin America. The useful juxtaposition of Canadian and Latin American experiences comes at a time when the trend in Canada is to back away from the perhaps overly generous or ineffectively administered elements of the labor legislation/social security net and when Latin American countries have undertaken significant reforms of their past systems but require further changes to move toward the sorts of legislation and support systems that characterize developed countries. The experiences of Canada and Latin America are mutually relevant since all are small economies forced to adjust to events at the world or hemispheric level and most are inclined to approach policy in an intermediate fashion which falls between the more market-oriented American and the more interventionist European models. Together with its comparative aspect, this volume attempts a more balanced and in-depth assessment in each of the policy areas than has hitherto been available. The gradually increasing base of available empirical data on the period after the reforms has been used in the studies, which provide thorough syntheses of the available research for Canada and Latin America.

This book explores the impact of foreign migrant workers on elements of sovereign power in Japan and examines how the country's immigration control has been reshaped by the existence of these workers. It traces the changing situation of foreign migrant workers in Japan from the mid-1980s to the present day. A particular focus is the transition of these workers from 'temporary workers' to "long-term stayers" or "social beings."

America has recently rediscovered its sweatshops. High profile scandals-from Kathy Lee to Nike-have brought the shocking and substandard conditions of factories to light, causing more Americans to become aware of the relationship between the American consumer and foreign laborer. Focusing on sweatshops located in the United States as well as those abroad whose products are purchased by American consumers, these essays offer a historical perspective on sweatshops and on their role in global migration and economics. They also chronicle efforts to control and eradicate sweatshops and suggest how these campaigns were and remain both national and global.

Leading experts examine, for the first time, the impact of New Labour policies on the labor market over the past five years. Looking behind the "good news" implied by the lowest headline unemployment rates since the 1970s and by a low and stable rate of inflation, it examines the impact of policies such as the minimum wage, the New Deal, Working Family Tax Credit scheme, policies on lone parents, and changes in the education system.