经纬度延伸:发展劳动价值论

依据卫兴华教授的《劳动价值论需要创新与发展》一文的结构框架,提出用“经纬度延伸”这一核心思路来解决劳动价值论的矛盾问题。本文认为,传统的关于“商品生产”的劳动价值论是狭隘的,应该经度由生产延伸到流通,纬度由商品延伸到服务,从而形成完整意义上的劳动价值论。在构建了新框架体系基础上,还探讨了其它相关问题,证明根据“经纬度延伸”这一思路能够对劳动价值论中现有的矛盾进行合理的解释。     

Labor Law in China: How Does It Contribute to the Economic Security of the Workforce? A Commonsian Reading

By adopting the “reasonable value” notion applied to the labor relationship as proposed by John R. Commons, I study the way in which labor legislation in China can be understood as the search for a status of employment security for rural migrant workers. However, the Chinese labor market is experiencing growth in a particular form of informal labor: delegated and temporary labor. I analyze this contradiction not as a failure of the legislation itself, but as the product of a particular institutional context which provides a way to skirt the law, and thereby diminish its effectiveness. Finally, in a non-democratic state, labor law — which has been instrumentalized and mobilized within a form of state corporatism — reveals that very significant challenges exist for building a truly secure status for employees.     

United States income inequality: The concept of countervailing power revisited

This article uses some of the conceptual infrastructure associated with J.K. Galbraith’s “countervailing power” argument to explore the deep history of U.S. income inequality. Two explanatory variables—institutional power and distributive conflict—have played an integral role in the shifting patterns of U.S. income inequality since the late nineteenth century. The “commodified” power of large firms, manifested in aggregate concentration and the markup, exacerbates inequality while the “countervailing” power of organized labor, manifested in union density and strike activity, mitigates inequality. One implication of this research is that U.S. income inequality is unlikely to diminish unless the labor movement (or a comparable social movement) is strengthened.     

The Role of Income Effects in Early Retirement

We provide a long‐term perspective on the individual retirement behavior and on the future of retirement by emphasizing the role of (negative) income effects. We consider a political economic theoretical framework, with actuarially “fair” and “unfair” early retirement schemes, and derive a political equilibrium with positive social security contribution rates and early retirement. A reduction in the wages in youth, consistent with the recent labor market trends since the massive introduction of temporary jobs, induces workers to postpone retirement, and—in the “unfair” system—leads to lower contribution rates. A reduction in the growth rate of the economy has opposite effects on the retirement decisions, leading—in the “unfair” system—to more early retirement. Aging induces a negative income effect, but has also an opposite political effect on social security contributions and retirement decisions. For an actuarially “fair” social security system, we provide conditions for the political effect to dominate; in an “unfair” scheme, numerical simulations confirm a slight predominance of the political effect, as contribution rates increase. These results may shed some light on the future of early retirement in aging societies.     

A Generalized Exactly Additive Decomposition of Aggregate Labor Productivity Growth

Aggregate labor productivity (ALP) growth—i.e., growth of output per unit of labor—may be decomposed into additive contributions due to within‐sector productivity growth effect, dynamic structural reallocation effect (Baumol effect), and static structural reallocation effect (Denison effect) of cross‐sectional components (e.g., industry or region) of output and labor. This paper implements ALP growth decomposition that is “generalized” to output in constant prices and to output in chained prices (i.e., chained volume measure or CVM) and “exactly additive” since with either output the sum of contributions exactly equals “actual” ALP growth. It compares this “generalized exactly additive” decomposition (GEAD) to the “traditional” (TRAD) ALP growth decomposition devised for output in constant prices. The results show GEAD and TRAD are exactly additive when output is in constant prices, but GEAD is exactly additive while TRAD is not when output is in CVM. Also, GEAD components are empirically purer than or analytically superior to those from TRAD. Moreover, considering that contributions to ALP growth can be classified by industry or region each year over many years, GEAD provides a more well‐grounded picture over time of industrial or regional transformation than TRAD. Therefore, GEAD should replace TRAD in practice.     

Measuring the Labor Income Share of Developing Countries: Lessons From Social Accounting Matrices

This paper addresses the challenges of measuring the labor income share of developing countries. The poor availability and reliability of national account data as well as the fact that self-employed—whose labor income is hard to capture—account for a major share of the workforce and often work in the informal sector render its computation difficult. Consequently, measuring the labor share requires assumptions. I consult social accounting matrices in addition to national account data to gain information on the production structure and self-employed incomes in developing countries. The final data set covers about 90 developing countries from 1990 to 2011. The data suggest that the finding of declining labor shares of previous studies also applies to the sample of low and middle-income countries. Furthermore, I find the labor share in developing countries to be about one-half in size and hence less than the standard “two-thirds” in economic literature.     

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? GENDER,LABOR, AND DISCOURSE IN THE NOIDA EXPORT PROCESSING ZONE AND DELHI

Abstract

Export processing zones (EPZs) are like islands of globalization. Much of the literature on EPZs and export-oriented industries (EOIs) notes a preponderance of women who are constructed as “cheap,” “nimble fingered,” and “docile” labor. This literature is dominated by socialist feminist thinkers, and this paper argues that there is a need to incorporate the insights of postmodern feminist thinkers. The article focuses on the role that language, discourse, and subjectivity play in the gendering process in handmade jewelry production in the Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ) and in the ranch production units related by common ownership in Delhi, India. It thus gives “voices” to women and men, and brings out their agency in structuring the labor market. The study confirms that gender division of labor is a product of discursive and material practices that are reproduced through discourses into which different actors invest, and that feed into the gendered subjective identities of these actors.     

Institutionalism,Planning, and the Current Crisis

This article originated in a shock of recognition. In the second volume of his discourse on “Civilization and Capitalism,” Fernand Braudel muses on the “eclecticism” of “the most advanced kind of capitalism”: “As if the characteristic advantage of standing at the commanding heights of the economy … consisted precisely of not having to confine oneself to a single choice, of being able, as today’s businessmen would put it, to keep one’s options open.”¹ My colleagues and I work as venture capitalists and as investment bankers of a specialized kind, engaged in raising capital to support the growth of technologybased companies and in realizing liquidity for their founding investors—often ourselves—by managing public offerings of their shares or by merging them into much larger companies. A primary virtue of our practice is the opportunity to choose with broad discretion where to commit our own and our clients’ capital across what Braudel calls “the differential geography ofprofit.”²     

Theory-driven facts and the growth in earnings inequality

It is widely accepted that the rise in U.S. wage inequality can be explained by skill-biased technological change: workplace computerization produced demand shifts that worked with a simply supply and demand “vision” of the labor market than with direct statistical evidence, which is remarkably limited. Indeed, the dominance of this elementary textbook vision has led, I argue, to a conflation between statistical facts and “theory-driven” facts—those statements about reality that are selected, interpreted, or simply created to confirm a vision of the way things work. The paper concludes by outlining an alternative explanation of the growth in wage inequality based on a sharply different, Gordonian, vision of the labor market.     

Population,land, and growth

This paper suggests a new explanation for changes in economic and population growth with a long run perspective, emphasizing the role of land in the development process. Starting from a pre-industrialization state called the “Malthusian regime”, land and labor are the main production factors. The size of population is limited by the quantity of land available for households and by incomes. Technical progress driven by a “Boserupian effect” may push the economy towards a take-off regime. In this regime, capital accumulation begins and a “learning-by-doing” effect in production takes over from the “Boserupian effect”. If this effect is strong enough, the economy can reach an “ultimate growth regime”. In the different phases, land plays a crucial role.     

Second-Best Pigouvian Taxation: A Clarification

This paper argues that the search for a “purely environmental” component of a tax on goods or factors of production that impact the environment—separate from its redistributive and distortive effects—is fraught with difficulties. The quest is often impossible because of the interconnectedness between labor supply, consumption decisions and the environmental quality. The paper differentiates between two conceptualization for “the Pigouvian tax” that have been employed in the literature and argues that each has tried to isolate the environmental component in its own way. One conceptualization, due to Cremer et al. (J Public Econ 70:343–364, 1998) does so by ruling out direct feedback from changes in environmental quality on the incentive effect of the tax. In the second conceptualization, due to Bovenberg and Ploeg’s (J Public Econ 55:349–390, 1994), incentive effects are ruled out by making consumers’ valuation of environmental quality independent of the labor supply. This is achieved by assuming separability between labor supply and other goods (including environmental equality). To convey its message, the paper studies the properties of optimal polluting and non-polluting non-labor input taxes in a Mirrleesian model with endogenously determined wages.     

Marx and Ricardo on machinery: a critical note

This article critically discusses the important and relevant—not to mention controversial— views of Ricardo and Marx on the impact of machinery on labor productivity, the organization of production and the wages and employment prospects of the working class during the capitalism of their day. First, the article turns to Ricardo’s assessment of the introduction of machinery and its likely effects on the laborer and the rate of profit and accumulation—one which went through a substantial revision (and reversal) between the first and third editions of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Then, we discuss Marx’s own critical analysis of the historical development of machinery and its impact on the labor process, the so-called “compensation principle,” and how the rising organic composition of capital ostensibly generates a “redundant or surplus-population” during the course of capitalist development. We highlight Marx’s intellectual debt to Ricardo, John Barton (and George Ramsay) insofar as his theory of technological unemployment is concerned. Lastly, the article summarizes the views of Ricardo and Marx and offers some concluding remarks.     

Informal Employment and the Structure of Wages in India: A Review of Trends

The “alternative”, “atypical” or “informal” workforce has grown in developed and developing countries alike. One of the more recent evolutions of informal employment has been of informal employment within formal enterprises. In the interest of flexibility and cost‐reduction, many formal firms increasingly resort to hiring workers on a temporary or informal basis. Alongside, and perhaps, as a result of the persistence and pervasiveness of informal employment, issues relating to inequality have come to the fore. This paper is motivated by these two intertwining aspects of Indian labor market—informality and wage inequality. Using nationally representative sample data, the paper examines trends in wage inequality among various forms of informal workers, overlaying these findings with broader trends in inequality. Using a regression based inequality decomposition, the paper compares the sources of wage inequality across different employment groups and the reasons for differences in wage inequality.     

China Bashing: Does Trade Drive the “Bad” News about China in the USA?

A monthly index of “bad” news about China as reported in the USA from January 1990 to December 2008 is developed in this paper. “Bad” is defined as news touching on the following issues: human rights, Tibet, child labor, democracy, and repression. Using this bad news index, this paper documents a peculiar finding: 3–4 months after a trade deficit shock to the US–China bilateral trade balance, the frequency of bad news published about China by US media outlets rises sharply, then dies off slowly. Statistical analysis reveals that the likelihood that this finding is just a coincidence is relatively small—about 1%. In addition, this paper finds a robust association between the annual number of Congressional hearings on China and the US–China bilateral trade deficit. These results suggest that “China bashing” may be endogenous to fluctuations in the US–China bilateral trade balance.     

对中国“知识失业”成因的一个解释

许多国家的经验表明,在教育快速发展的过程中往往伴随着“知识失业”。近年来,我国在经历教育快速发展的同时,也开始面临这样的问题。本文以扩展的工作搜寻模型为框架,分析了当前“知识失业”产生的原因。根据分析结果,现阶段出现的“知识失业”,在很大程度上是由劳动力市场的制度性分割引起的,因此应该逐步消除劳动力市场的制度性分割,鼓励大学毕业生到西部和农村等次要劳动力市场上就业,在确定高等教育的发展规模时要适当考虑劳动力市场的发育状况。     

劳动、价值和企业所有权——马克思劳动价值论的现代拓展

现代“管理革命”和“资本革命”改变了马克思价值理论得以孕育的客观条件。在出资、创业、管理三种职能分离的当代大型企业中 ,创造价值的劳动是包含创业者、管理者及专业资本经营者在内的组合劳动。相应 ,剩余价值也由过去的资本独占演变成了由资本与劳动分享。而两者的分享比例则受创业必要资本量和劳动的人力资本特征(创新性、可测性 )等变量的影响。至于资本报酬及资本所有权的原因 ,则是资本的稀缺性。简言之 ,劳动分享净剩余的根源是劳动知识化 ,而资本分享净剩余则源于资本稀缺性的继续存在。本文最后简述了上述观点对我国社会主义改革的几点启示。     

Human capital heterogeneity of the unemployed and jobless recoveries

The jobless recovery enigma remains largely unsolved. As a special case of broader unemployment, the term “jobless recovery” describes an economic recovery where output recovers—and even expands—yet employment growth remains anemic. While the effects of these prolonged recoveries are significant—from increased crime to a lifetime reduction in wages—they are not well understood. Building on the insights of labor market matching models that incorporate heterogeneity among workers, this paper sheds light on jobless recoveries, developing a first-of-its-kind index of human capital heterogeneity for the unemployed, and testing that index using of a Structural Vector Autoregression. I demonstrate that the extent to which unemployed human capital is heterogeneous and specific, rather than homogeneous and general, plays a key and under-appreciated role in the labor market; increases in human capital heterogeneity can account for between one-quarter to three-quarters of the joblessness of the past three recoveries in the pre-COVID era.     

A particular class of continuous-time stochastic growth models

This paper generalizes to uncertaintly the neoclassical one-sector model by transforming the basic differential equation on the capital labor ratio into a “stochastic” differential equation. The capital-labor ratio and related economic variables become random variables whose probability distributions vary with time, and the paper is focused on the existence of a steady state denfined by the (probabilistic) stationarity of these variables. An application of the results is given for a specific example with a Cobb-Douglas production function and uncertainty on the saving coefficient, the labor-force rate of growth, and the capital depreciation rate.     

Import-push or export-pull? An industry-level analysis of the impact of trade on firm exit

Does the selection effect of trade work solely through competition from imports, or does the export market further contribute to firm selection? This paper provides a re-interpretation of the different mechanisms in terms of selection on profitability—rather than productivity—and derives novel predictions regarding the export market and the role of product differentiation. Empirical results for a sample of Danish manufacturing industries confirm the import-“push” hypothesis as well as the export-“pull” hypothesis, but also reveal differences across industries. The selection effect of trade is mainly driven by the “import-push” if product differentiation is high, whereas it is driven by the “export-pull” if goods are homogeneous.     

Trade, Skills and Adjustment Costs: A Study of Intra-Sectoral Labor Mobility

The relationship between the ability of workers to change job, sector or industry and the short‐run adjustment costs associated with a reallocation of labor is the subject of lively debate among academics. This paper examines recent sector and industry level labor market adjustment in the UK using data from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey. We explore the link between the nature of UK trade patterns and labor adjustment within the manufacturing sector and employ a multinomial logit approach to examine the determinants of “within” and “between” industry mobility. By controlling for individual skill specificity we find some evidence of a link between intra‐industry trade and intra‐industry labor adjustment.