At the time in which this book was first published in 1987, mass unemployment had emerged as the dominant, most visible, problem of the West European economies. The post-war experience of expansion was remarkable in that it experienced growth high enough to sustain a consensus on the possibility and desirability of full employment. This period declined into one of poor economic performance in the 1970s. Growth slowed and the subsequent years were characterised by painful adjustment and dislocation. In this challenging discussion of ways to overcome unemployment Ciaran Driver stresses the importance of managed restructuring. Driver focuses attention of the role of investment in fixed assets and human resources, and argues that governments do have a major role in steering the economy through a period of turbulent change, and that there are policies which can move the economy towards full employment. This book is ideal for students of business and economics.

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.

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.

The idea was simple: pack a suitcase, go to another city where you have no connections and try to find a job, anonymously. That was the idea that took Florence Aubenas - one of France's most accomplished undercover journalists - on a journey into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Day after day she searched for work, one unemployed worker among others, with no special skills or qualifications. She immersed herself in the crowd of job seekers, going from one employment office to another, eventually managing to cobble together a few hours working as a night cleaner on a ferry that crossed the English Channel. For many people the global financial crisis seems real enough but remote from their daily lives. They have little sense of what it really means to be unemployed in the midst of a recession. Florence Aubenas was determined to find out. This book is the story of her journey. The Night Cleaner became an instant number one bestseller in France and has subsequently become a bestseller in many countries throughout the world. Better than any academic treatise on the topic, this book shows what recession means today.

Multinationals have global reach in their search for profits; women, even more than men, are confined to their immediate community in their search for jobs. This book examines the interaction between multinationals and women in UK, Ireland, France and Germany, looking at inward investment by US and Japanese multinationals, as well as outward investment by European multinationals.

Sebastian Dullien gives a novel explanation for unemployment and inflation in the Euro-Zone. He argues that unemployment stems from a lack of cooperation between unions and monetary authorities: In an economy with endogenous money as EMU, wage setters are responsible for price stability while the central bank is responsible for the level of output. Cooperation between both actors is necessary for high employment and low inflation. The current institutional set-up is found to be unable to assure cooperation.

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."

Covering the development of the U.S. labor market from 1880-1940, The Fictitious Commodity stresses relations of authority (versus power) in employment. Deemphasizing concepts of market and contract, Korver focuses on the differential statuses of employer/employee and demonstrates the inadequacy of conventional economic discourse on labor market analysis. U.S. companies, while undergoing rapid industrialization, tackled both organizational and technological problems. According to Korver, unskilled labor was the common root to these problems. Emphasizing the importance of this usually forgotten category, Korver's history of the U.S. labor market is seen through America's unskilled labor--its vicissitudes and its varying options of citizenship. In 19th-century America unskilled labor was both expensive and in short supply. According to Korver, new immigration coupled unskilled labor with the novel option of citizenship. Removing its segregated status, new immigration became an integral part of the emerging world of mass production. Korver demonstrates how the ground was prepared technologically by connecting mechanization and standardization. Bureaucratization of employment relationships, development of industrial unionism, and social security serve to illustrate the organizational integration of the new immigrant. Advanced students and researchers in the field of labor economics, labor history, and the sociology of labor markets will appreciate Korver's unique approach to the history of the American labor market.

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.

This timely analysis examines the complex state of youth unemployment across Europe and offers cogent policy suggestions for addressing this longstanding societal problem. The findings reveal numerous national and regional factors affecting youth joblessness-not only market and economic challenges, but also deep sociocultural and political dynamics underlying the situations. Coverage details how the standard transition from school to work is disrupted in an already depressed adult job market, and compares a wide range of responses in terms of both young people's educational decision-making and national youth policy. In particular, contributors assess whether the current crop of Youth Guarantee programs can/should be a model for employment policy across the continent. Among the topics covered: Youth labour market prospects and recent policy developments. Youth labour market in Central and Eastern Europe. Early school dropout in Spain: evolution during the Great Recession. Overeducation among European university graduates: a constraint or a choice? Promoting youth employment in Europe: evidence-based policy lessons. The evaluation of a Finnish youth guarantee: lessons for Europe? European Youth Labour Markets is of interest to an international audience of economists, sociologists, and leaders in governmental, non-profit, and corporate sectors through its broad and comparative macroeconomic focus and implications for policymaking, research, resource allocation, and policy evaluation.

The object of this study is to clarify why and how it happened that women remained marginal in the processes of social change that took place during the development of Israeli society. Bernstein examines the role played by continuous unemployment, by the predominance of construction work, and by the dependence on the World Zionist Organization and the Mandate authorities. She also shows how the individual and collective achievements of women shaped the means for future achievements and how their failure impeded further efforts. The author demonstrates that their failure to change the status of women did not stem from any sort of biological imperative, nor from some inevitable trend of social movements towards conservatism, but rather from the power relations between the women who aspired to change and those who opposed it. The aspiration for change was real and ran deep, but its advocates were few and weak, while its adversaries--and the apathetic-- were numerous and strong. And, the struggle took place under economic conditions that would have made significant change difficult even if the balance of power had been more favorable. Finally, the author demonstrates how the movement for innovation and change lost its impetus, and conservative elements won.

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.

Do accelerating trade and foreign direct investment - experimented by most developing countries in the 1990s - imply a positive, negative, or neutral impact in terms of employment, income inequality and poverty alleviation? This book provides some empirically-tested answers to this question using an open-minded, unconventional economic approach and deriving original policy implications. ELI BERMAN Boston University, USA LUIGI CAMPIGLIO Catholic University of Milano, Italy GIOVANNI ANDREA CORNIA Firenze University, Italy PAOLO FIGINI Bologna University, Italy AUGUSTIN FOSU African Economic Research Consortium, Nairobi JEAN BAPTISTE GROS International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland SANJAYA LALL Oxford University, UK JOHN LANGMORE International Labour Office, New York, USA STEPHEN MACHIN University College, London, UK GIORGIO BARBA NAVARETTI Milano University, Italy MARIACRISTINA PIVA Catholic University of Piacenza, Italy SANJAY REDDY Columbia University, New York, USA ENRICO SANTARELLI Bologna University, Italy VINCENZO SPIEZIA Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris, France LANCE TAYLOR New School University, New York, USA RAYMOND TORRES Organizatio

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.