正视农村剩余劳动力转移的挑战

中国在10年左右的周期内农村剩余劳动力转出的总规模需要达到1．5亿到两亿人。城乡劳动力对就业岗位的竞争正在趋于激化。大中型城市将是新增就业岗位的主要来源。就业岗位正在成为国际竞争中最稀缺的资源。就业优先应当成为最重要的战略取向。劳动力市场发育要优先于其他要素的市场发育,就业岗位增加要优先于社会收入水平提高。就业政策的重点是要防止供求不平衡导致交易价格被压低到供给成本之下,同时保证有限的就业机会优先分配给最优秀、最有效率的群体。     

发达国家服务业就业结构变迁对我国的启示

发达国家服务业就业结构的演变过程表明：服务业就业比重的提高主要是由以商务服务业为主的生产者服务业和以教育、医疗卫生业为主的社会服务业就业增长推动的。生产者服务业和社会服务业是今兽譬国就业增长的主要领域．但服务业难以承担大规模转移农村剩余劳动力的任务。发展劳动密集型制造业仍是今后转移我国农业剩余劳动力的主要渠道。     

Trade Sanctions and the Incidence of Child Labor

The purpose of this paper is to develop an imperfect competition model of a small open developing country to analyze the effects of trade sanctions on the incidence of child labor. We show that a uniform tariff levied by the developed countries on imports produced with the help of child labor is a failure in terms of reducing child labor. A more effective course of action would be a firm‐specific tariff where the tariff rate varies with the amount of child labor incorporated in a single good. While such an instrument reduces child labor, however, it worsens the children’s well‐being due to lower income and consumption. Contrary to expectations, the entrepreneurs in the developing countries, supposedly the main beneficiaries of child labor, are better off under trade sanctions as they realize higher profits.     

从开放宏观的视角看环境污染问题:一个综述

在全球化背景下,伴随着国际间的要素流动,环境问题越来越多地被赋予了全球化的内容。本文将环境与增长、环境与贸易、环境与就业、环境与人口迁移等研究文献纳入到一个开放宏观分析框架中,通过文献研究发现,国际分工使"南—北"之间存在了多纬度的"环境不平等":首先,环境与经济增长问题先后经历了三个发展阶段,即罗马俱乐部提出的"增长极限说"、环境库兹涅茨曲线假说、贸易与环境库兹涅茨曲线假说相关性的争论。随着研究的推进,环境与增长问题越来越类似于一枚硬币的两面,难以同时兼得,但是,由于国际分工模式的差异,发展中国家却为发达国家提供了"污染储藏地"。其次,虽然环境规制使企业损失了部分"棕色"就业,但是环境保护同样能够创造"绿色"就业,然而,在国际分工背景下,环境保护是否有利于发展中国家的整体就业还存在着争议。最后,环境恶化已经导致一些国家出现了"环境难民"以及随之而来的人口迁移。到2050年,全世界由气候变化引起的人口迁移很可能达到5千万至7亿。然而,穷国和富国的环境压力和迁移能力却不尽相同,从某种程度上,这也是国际分工产生的间接影响,但是,关于这一问题的研究还十分有限。     

A Case for a Partially Disaggregated Theory of Inflation

Approaches to economic development have overemphasized negative economic freedom for multinational corporations at the expense of a majority of the population in developing countries. An inevitable outcome has been the growth of informal sector and "vulnerable" employment in developing countries and entrenchment of existing inequalities. We argue that rather than an emphasis on negative freedom, an emphasis on using labor standards to facilitate positive economic freedom must occur. Labor standards do this not only through the "core" rights of union membership and collective bargaining, but also in addressing substantive ("non-core") rights at work (wages, working-time, etc.), thereby facilitating positive freedom.     

Global Defeminization? Industrial Upgrading and Manufacturing Employment in Developing Countries

Globalization has for decades been associated with a rise in the female share of employment or feminization. This study finds that since the mid 1980s, export growth in developing countries is associated with feminization in some countries and a defeminization in others. Focusing on Southeast Asia and Latin America, it uses a fixed-effects econometric model to test whether the technological conditions of production (labor or capital intensity) rather than export growth account for shifts in the female share of employment in manufacturing. It finds that the capital intensity of production, evidenced by shifts in labor productivity, is negatively and significantly related to shifts in the female share of employment in manufacturing, while exports are statistically insignificant. The study concludes that an anti-female bias exists in labor demand changes that result from output or employment shifts in developing countries when manufacturing becomes more capital intensive, a process likely related to industrial upgrading.     

Technology shocks around the world

This article investigates the effects of a permanent technology shock on labor input in the major seven developed countries. The recent empirical literature which uses Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) with long-run restrictions has argued that technology shocks lead to a persistent and significant decline in employment in most of the G7 countries. We claim that the international transmission of shocks prevents the use of existing SVAR models, but also suggests alternative specifications to properly uncover their effects. We show in a quantitative two-country model that a measure of labor productivity aggregated across countries is more immune to persistent, if not permanent, shocks and allows to accurately identify the responses of the labor input to a technology shock. Using labor productivity at the G7 aggregate level, we find that the response of employment changes critically in most of the major seven developed countries.     

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.     

Globalization,labor standards,and women's rights: dilemmas of collective (in)action in an interdependent world

This paper challenges the idea that a “social clause” to enforce global labor standards through international trade agreements serves the interests of women export workers in poor countries. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh and empirical studies, the author argues that exploitative as these jobs appear to Western reformers, for many women workers in the South they represent genuine opportunities. Clearly, these women would wish to better their working conditions; yet having no social safety net, and knowing that jobs in the informal economy, their only alternative, offer far worse prospects, women cannot fight for better conditions. Moreover, global efforts to enforce labor standards through trade sanctions may lead to declining employment or to the transfer of jobs to the informal economy. Lacking measures that also address the conditions of workers in this informal economy, demands for “the social clause” will reinforce, and may exacerbate, social inequalities in the labor market.     

Guaranteed Manufactured without Child Labor: The Economics of Consumer Boycotts, Social Labeling and Trade Sanctions

Does labeling products “Child‐Labor Free” provide a market‐based solution to the pervasive employment of child labor? This paper explores the promise of social labeling in the context of its four oft‐noted objectives: child labor employment, consumer information, welfare, and trade linkages, when competition between the North and South is based both on comparative cost advantage, and the use of child labor as a hidden product attribute. We show that (i) social labeling benefits consumers and Southern producers, whereas children and Northern producers are worse off; (ii) trade sanctions on unlabeled products deteriorates Southern terms of trade, but leaves the incidence of child labor strictly unaffected; and (iii) a threat to sanction imports of unlabeled Southern products discourages the South from maintaining a credible social labeling program. We also explore the question of whether social labeling should be viewed as a transitory or a permanent institution in developing economies.     

国际贸易中的劳工、环境标准之争及发展趋势

近年来,发达国家与发展中国家就国际贸易中劳工、环境标准问题的争论愈加激烈.本文分劳工、环境标准的"公平贸易"之争、WTO引入劳工、环境标准的"合理性"之争两方面对此进行了评述,并预测了其发展趋势.文章认为,劳工、环境标准与国际贸易挂钩是迟早的事.我们一方面需防止贸易伙伴国出于贸易保护需要对劳工、环境标准的滥用;同时应积极主动地运用国际公认的劳工、环境标准,以提升我国产品的国际竞争力.     

Fertility and labor supply: evidence from the One-Child Policy in China

This study provides new evidence on on the causal effect of fertility on maternal labor supply in rural China, using the fact that in some parts of rural China couples are allowed to have a second child if their firstborn is female. Estimates show that a second child reduces maternal labor force participation by 4.6 percentage points, labor supply intensity (hours worked conditional on employment) by 1.4 h per week and monthly income by 54.5 Chinese Yuan (18.7 percent). Further, the labor supply of mothers whose husbands are rural-to-urban migrants is the most sensitive to having an additional child, likely because they have more difficulty balancing farming and childcare. Conversely, labor supply is not reduced by fertility for mothers living in three-generation families, most likely because grandparents can provide both time and money to help with childcare.     

Exploitation of Child Labor and the Dynamics of Debt Bondage

This paper is concerned with the institution of debt bondage and child labor employment in the context of an agrarian economy with overlapping generations. The model explores the principal-agent interaction between landlords and tenants, and identifies a set of reasons why households put children to work in response to the need to service outstanding debts, only to realize that child labor work is exploited, and households are made strictly worse off in general equilibrium. Debt bondage in one generation is further shown to leave spillover effects, and contribute to the cycle of debt, bonded child labor and poverty across generations. In this context, the effectiveness of trade sanctions as a policy response to bonded child labor is evaluated. Contrary to expectations, a trade ban can set off a sequence of increasing indebtedness among agrarian households that offset the intended (static) disincentives to employ child labor.     

The Future European Labor Supply: The Critical Role of the Family

The European employment strategy initiated in 1997 is critically dependent upon the further integration of women into the labor market. The European Union has set a specific target employment rate for women of 60 percent by 2010 and is also committed to providing more and better child care facilities. This gender focus is reinforced by the requirement for gender mainstreaming in all aspects of European employment policy. There is an implied Europe-wide, universal policy of encouraging female labor-market participation and reducing the care work performed by domestic labor. However, the European Commission continues to have limited competence in areas of family, social, and welfare policy. As a result, these common employment objectives for women are thus being pursued against a background of quite different systems of social, family, welfare, and indeed labor-market organization. These systems have different economic and employment implications, such that the outcomes of the common European employment strategy will also be highly variable.     

Life cycle employment and fertility across institutional environments

In this paper, we formulate a dynamic utility maximization model of female labor force participation and fertility choices and estimate approximate decision rules using data on married women in Italy, Spain and France. The estimated decision rules indicate that first-order state dependence is the most important factor determining female labor supply behavior in all three countries. We also find that cross-country differences in state dependence effects are consistent with the order of country-level measures of labor market flexibility and child care availability. Counterfactual simulations of the model indicate that female employment rates in Italy and Spain could reach EU target levels were French social policies to be adopted in those countries.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of labor market interventions on reducing the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper evaluates whether different labor market policy interventions taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have been effective in reducing its adverse impacts. We construct a database covering 165 countries and 39 labor market interventions grouped into four pillars: stimulating the economy and jobs (pillar 1); supporting enterprises, employment, and incomes (pillar 2); protecting workers (pillar 3); and social dialogue (pillar 4). The results revealed that measures taken under pillars 1, 2, and 3 have reduced the impacts of the pandemic on economic growth; measures under pillar 4 were significantly associated with reducing its impacts on employment and those under pillar 2 with reducing its impacts on working hours.     

Is trade liberalization a solution to the unemployment problem?

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects the growth rate of sectoral employment in developed and developing countries. The estimation results imply that trade openness in the form of higher trade volumes has not been successful in generating jobs in developing countries. The overall weak, negative employment response to trade volumes may be explained by the negative output response to trade openness in these countries. Our estimates also indicate that higher trade volumes have adverse effect on industrial employment in developed countries. Moreover, while they have positive effect on employment in industry and services in developing countries, trade barriers have adverse effect on employment growth in services for developed countries. Our overall results imply that while trade barriers have relatively little adverse effects and/or in some case a positive effect on employment both in developing and developed countries, higher trade volumes have an adverse effect on industrial employment in developed economies. Thus, trade openness is not in itself a solution to the unemployment problems of developing countries and yet it has not been the prime factor to blame for the lower employment levels in developed countries.     

Labor Mobility and East Asian Integration

East Asian economic integration is commonly analyzed in the context of trade in goods and services and capital flows, while labor flows have been very much neglected. Yet labor flows in the region are rapidly growing, given the diversity in levels of economic development, employment opportunities and wage levels, and the existence of labor surplus and deficit countries. Labor migration poses more benefits than costs for both sending and receiving countries, but there are more sensitivities toward labor flows than trade and capital flows. The characteristics and government policies are different for the unskilled and semiskilled foreign workers and for the professionals and highly skilled. Regional cooperation among countries is needed to manage the flows, reduce the incidence of illegal and undocumented workers, reduce the transaction costs of migration, and protect the rights of these workers.     

How many educated workers for your economy? European targets,optimal public spending,and labor market impact

This paper studies optimal taxation schemes for education in a search-matching model where the labor market is divided between a high-skill and a low-skill sector. Two public policy targets - maximizing the total employment level and optimizing the social surplus - are studied according to three different public taxation strategies. We calibrate our model using evidence from thirteen European countries, and compare our results with the target from the Europe 2020 Agenda for achievement in higher education. We show that, with current labor market characteristics, the target set by governments seems compatible with the social surplus maximization objective for some countries, while being too high for other countries. For all countries, maximizing employment would imply higher educational spending than that required for the social surplus to reach its maximum.     

Urban job creation and unemployment in LDCs: Todaro vs. Harris and Todaro

Overwhelming urban migration occurred so rapidly in many developing countries that widespread unemployment and squalid living conditions are commonplace. For many of these countries, stopping urban migration has become a major policy. Two models propose 2 different theories of urban unemployment. Todaro's short-term effects model concludes that job creation actually causes unemployment. Todaro and Harris formulated a long-term effects model in which welfare subsidies create more employment and stimulate the economy. A real solution to urban job creation would include optimal allocation of investment between the rural and labor sectors. A once and for all hiring tax would reduce replacement hiring. It is impossible to design an optimal tax subsidy package for urban unemployment unless it includes knowledge of the dynamic response of migration and unemployment to the rate of net and gross hiring of labor. If subsidy taxes are levied on the agricultural sector, the net result may be a higher rate of capital formation in the (low social return) manufacturing sector and a lower one in the agricultural sector.