Promoting High Quality Work: Obstacles and Opportunities

This article addresses competing arguments from ethics as well as economics about the obstacles and opportunities for promoting high quality work (i.e. work that sustains and enhances well-being). It ultimately defends on ethical as well as economic grounds the case for maximising the number and equalising the distribution of high quality work opportunities and outlines some policy measures that might be used to achieve the latter objective. The article contributes to the business ethics literature principally by offering a systematic and interdisciplinary analysis of the scope and necessity for progress in the quality of working life.     

The term structure of interest rates and the Mexican economy

Can the yield spread, which has been found to predict with surprising accuracy the movement of key macroeconomic variables of developed countries, also predict such variables for a developing country experiencing economic turmoil? This article presents empirical results that suggest significant forecasting ability for the yield spread for segments of the Mexican economy during the 1995–1997 period of economic volatility. The actual and predicted variable changes sometimes conflict with those experienced by developed countries in part because of the unusually close relationship between the Mexican Treasury and the Banco de México. Consequently, analysts and policy officials may exploit the forecast potential of the yield spread, but only in the context of evolving institutional considerations.     

Fear and hope in an age of mass automation: debating the future of work

Alternative perspectives from economics and political economy now agree that work is set to disappear through the impact of mass automation. Some worry about the negative effects on unemployment and inequality, while others see the opportunity to extend free time. This paper confronts and criticises these perspectives. It addresses previous visions of an automated (‘workless’) future presented by Marx and Keynes and shows the enduring barriers to working less in capitalist society. It then questions whether work will be reduced by technological progress; rather, it argues that work will likely persist, despite and indeed because of the wider use of new technology. The threat to workers from technology is seen to come more from the erosion in the quality of work than from the loss of work. The paper argues that a better future for work and workers ultimately depends on broader changes in ownership.     

Online,on call: the spread of digitally organised just‐in‐time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non‐standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT‐related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.     

Worker Cooperatives in the Theory of the Firm: Marx and Veblen on Technological Determinism

This article contends that, in their treatments of worker cooperatives, the predominant theories of the firm adhere to the logic of technological determinism, and can accordingly be evaluated using the ideas of Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx. Invoking these patriarchs’ respective distinctions between instrumental and ceremonial institutions and between the technical and social relations of production, the article argues that, contrary to contemporary theories of the firm, worker cooperatives possess an inherent but often latent advantage in implementing bureaucratic organizational structures, enjoying their instrumental/technical benefits for technology and coordination without incurring their ceremonial/social drawbacks for behavior and cooperation.     

The demand and supply of credit for households

The demand and supply of credit in the rural credit markets is investigated in this article using household data from India. The aim is to study the effects of household, farm productive characteristics and the policy variables on the demand and supply of credit. A type 3 Tobit model is estimated which corrects for sample selection and endogeniety bias. In addition, a generalized Double Hurdle model is estimated where the information on the household's access to credit is included to estimate the demand and supply of credit. The results suggest that the size of the operational holdings, net-wealth, dependency ratio, educational level of the household and the wages and output prices are important determinants of the demand and supply of credit for farm households. The Double Hurdle model confirms that the ‘size of land owned’ plays a crucial role in whether the household has access to a loan or not.     

Financial Innovation and Divisia Monetary Aggregates: Comment on Ford, Peng, Mullineux (1992)

This note shows that there is an error in the mathematical argument deployed by Ford et al . (1992). Once this is corrected, we see that, remarkably, the standard opportunity cost based weighting system remains appropriate even in the face of non-neutral technical change .