The morning after

The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League is battling a slump in revenues and sagging public interest in its cause, just as it gears up for a major fight over health care reform.     

马克思就业理论与西方就业理论比较研究

对中国失业的研究已是无法回避的一个问题,而寻求理论支持则是进行研究的一个重要方向。检索就业理论的资料,可以发现最有代表性的就业理论是马克思就业理论和西方就业理论。因此,对这两种就业理论加以比较,理解它们形成的不同背景和分析路径,对比它们不同的内容体系,可以发现它们其实发掘的只是失业的一个方面,遵循的是失业发生、发展的一条路径。因此,在比较中更全面地理解失业,并且可以为研究我国的失业提供某些启示。     

Foreign trade and its impact on employment: The Mexican case

This paper discusses the relationship between foreign trade and employment in a small open economy, and carries out some empirical work using Mexican data. It is argued that employment multipliers are not stable if intermediate inputs are imported. Actual employment multipliers will be given by the relationship between effective demand and installed capacity in each sector, and will depend strongly on whether quotas or tariffs are in operation. It is also found that Mexican exports are capital intensive relative to its imports.     

Different employment of capitals in vertically integrated sectors: Smith after the Austrians

The Austrian notion of stages of production and the related principle of the greater productivity of roundabout methods, plus the neo-Austrian notions of vertical integration and vertical division of labour, are utilized in this paper in an attempt to reconstruct Smith’s convoluted arguments on the different employment of capitals in chapter 5, book 2, of the Wealth of Nations. Smith’s arguments are first clarified in the light of the two concepts of capital (money capital and productive capital), of the two aspects of productive labour (living labour and dead labour) and of the two viewpoints (of an individual and of society) on which Smith’s theory is based. The results of this clarification are then used to prove that, independently of Smith’s own words but in consistency with his theory, the notions of “quantity” and “productivity” of productive labour have a “vertical”, as well as a “horizontal”, dimension so that they fit both the input–output scheme and the Austrian framework of time-consuming methods of production.     

The size of public employment: An empirical study

Previous empirical studies of government have focused primarily on aggregate financial measures of size. This analysis examines a different measure: the share of public employment in total employment. In empirical tests on OECD countries for 1970 and 1980, the level of public employment is shown to be a clear reflection of voter demand for public goods, electoral support for socialist parties, and political response to the problems of unemployment. In contrast, variables that measure characteristics of the political process, such as degree of government decentralization, strength of interest groups, and voter participation in elections, are not statistically significant.     

Investment and employment with unlimited labor: The role of aggregate demand

While the rate of growth of ouput has been rapid in many LDC's in the post-World War II period, the rate of growth of employment has been disappointing. This paper argues that the reason may lie in a lack of aggregate effective demand. It is pointed out that the main works in the field (such as those of Arthur Lewis and Dale Jorgenson) basically just assumed there could be no shortage of aggregate demand. A one-sector model, fitted to Malaysiandata, is used to quantify the argument.     

Insider-outsider forces in wage and employment determination: The case of Sweden

This paper applies a statistical approach used by Andersen & Hylleberg (1993) in their study of insider-outsider effects in wage-employment determination in the Danish manufacturing sector, to analyse insider-outsider effects in the Swedish private sector. Focusing on the univariate and multivariate trend properties of the data, a bivariate wage-employment error correction model is used as an explicit test-bed for the theoretical predictions of adjustments to anticipated and unanticipated shocks. According to the Blanchard & Summers (1986) insider-outsider model, the former changes are absorbed entirely by wages while the latter changes are reflected fully in employment. As in the case of analysis on Danish manufacturing data, it is found that the evidence based on data related to the Swedish private sector also fails to accept the Blanchard & Summers insider-outsider model in its unqualified version. Nonetheless several important traits of insider-outsider mechanisms seem to be in accordance with the observed evolution of the data.     

The employment elasticity in manufacturing: a comment on Mazumdar

We show that Mazumdar's recently proposed methods for estimatingthe elasticity of the wage bill with respect to output growth,and for decomposing the growth rate of the wage rate into anoutput effect, an employment effect, and a price effect, areproblematic. The decomposition proposed is a tautology becauseit can be equally derived from an accounting identity. Likewise,we show that the alleged elasticity of the wage bill with respectto output growth has to take on a value of unity by definition.     

关于教育与就业关系的一个理论模型及实证检验

In this paper, we divide the process of educational development into two aspects: the change in educational structure and the expansion of educational scale. Based on this hypothesis, we analyze the relationships between each of the two aspects and employment respectively. In this paper, the factors and the transmission mechanism of the influence that education has on employment are also explained. Then, the theoretical models of the relationship between education and employment are built up. Finally, we use the empirical data collected in China to test the theoretical models and give explanations to the status quo of the unemployment structure within various educational levels. It suggests that: the development of education in China at present is beneficial to the increase in the employment rate, the increase in the proportion of the laborers with junior school education has negative effects on employment, and the development of higher education creates positive effects on the employment, but no evidence shows any significant correlation between the proportion of the laborers with senior high school education and the unemployment rate. Translated from Xin Zhengzhi Jingjixue Pinglun 新政治经济学评论 (Review of New Political Economy), 2006, 2(1): 46–69     

The effects of employment protection: Learning from variable enforcement

Employment protection legislation (EPL) is not enforced uniformly across the board. There are a number of exemptions to the coverage of these provisions: firms below a given threshold scale and workers with temporary contracts are not subject to the most restrictive provisions. This within-country variation in enforcement allows us to make inferences on the impact of EPL which go beyond the usual cross-country approach. In this paper we develop a simple model which explains why these exemptions are in place to start with. Then we empirically assess the effects of EPL on dismissal probabilities and on the equilibrium size distribution of firms. Our results are in line with the predictions of the theoretical model. Workers under permanent contracts in firms with less restrictive EPL are more likely to be dismissed. However, there is no effect of the exemption threshold on the growth of firms.     

The shift to services employment: A review of the literature

This paper provides an overview of literature on the employment shift towards services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change: inter-industry productivity differences, the inter-industry division of labor (outsourcing), and shifts in final demand. It concludes that the third dimension gained importance over the last decades although differential productivity growth continued to contribute to the rise of service employment as well. Outsourcing of service tasks from manufacturing industries increased but cannot explain much of the rise in service-industry employment over time. The shift to services is not just a price effect nor is it mainly the effect of the outsourcing of service activities from manufacturing industries. The shift to services is real.     

Green fiscal reform and employment: A survey

In the European debate an increase in employment is generally regarded as an important extra-dividend-in addition to improved environmental quality-from environmental taxes. The scope of this paper is to evaluate, going through the existing empirical literature, if-and to what degree-this result could be achieved through a green fiscal reform. A further goal of this paper is to assess which taxes are more efficient in terms of employment-creation when they are utilized for recycling back to the economy the revenue flowing from environmental taxes. This kind of exercise is largely different from the theoretical analysis of the double dividend issue. A large quantity of literature has grown during the recent years according to this approach, but this version of the double dividend theory will be disregarded in this paper.     

Multinational companies and indirect employment: measurement and evidence

This study suggests a new approach towards measuring the indirect employment effects of multinational companies (MNCs) using a simple Cobb-Douglas production function. Based on the assumption that domestic sales by indigenous firms in a sector are supplies for multinationals in that sector rather than final goods, indirect employment effects are measured as the effect of an increase in domestically purchased inputs on employment in indigenously-owned suppliers. Applying this measure to data for the electronics sector in Ireland we find that there have been positive indirect effects of MNCs on employment in indigenous firms. The value of the estimated coefficients depends somewhat on the specification of the model estimated but the standard specification suggests that a 10% increase in domestically sold output by indigenous firms leads to an employment growth of around 2% in these firms.     

Informality,public employment and employment protection in developing countries

This paper proposes an equilibrium matching model for developing countries’ labor markets where the interaction between public, formal private and informal private sectors are taken into account. Theoretical analysis shows that gains from reforms aiming at liberalizing formal labor markets can be annulled by shifts in the public sector employment and wage policies. Since the public sector accounts for a substantial share of employment in developing countries, this approach is crucial to understand the main labor market outcomes of such economies. Wages offered by the public sector increase the outside option value of the workers during the bargaining processes in the formal and informal sectors. It becomes more profitable for workers to search on-the-job, in order to move to these more attractive and more stable types of jobs. The public sector therefore acts as an additional tax for the formal private firms. Using data on workers’ flows from Egypt, we show empirically and theoretically that the liberalization of labor markets plays against informal employment by increasing the profitability, and hence job creations, of formal jobs. The latter effect is however dampened or even sometimes nullified by the increase of the offered wages in the public sector observed at the same time.     

The time-varying relationship between credit spreads and employment growth

After the global financial crisis, several central banks introduced unconventional monetary policies, such as quantitative easing (QE). If QE increases asset prices, but does not boost the real economy to the same extent, the relationship between credit spreads and employment growth will weaken. This study investigates this issue for the U.S. in a moving-windows framework. Our results suggest that the link between credit spreads and employment growth is lower during bubbles and recessions. We also find that the relationship weakened after the Fed introduced QE.     

Pollution abatement and employment

Morgenstern et al. (J Environ Econ Manag 43:412–436, 2002. doi: 10.1006/jeem.2001.1191) are well-known for its investigation of the employment effects of environmental regulations. However, the cost function specified in that paper is handicapped by its reliance on survey data of the costs of inputs assigned to pollution abatement. In this paper, we specify an input distance function that models the joint production of good and bad outputs. This allows us to measure the relative importance of factors associated with changes in employment without pollution abatement cost data. We operationalize our model using a sample of 80 coal-fired electric power plants from 1995 to 2005.     

Trends in employment and the employment elasticity in manufacturing, 1971-92: an international comparison

Employment growth in manufacturing is limited by output growthin this sector, but the elasticity of employment with respectto output has varied widely in different regions and economies.This paper focuses attention on the idea that a major determinantof employment elasticity is the way the fruits of output growthare divided between employment growth and wage growth. But beforewe are able to determine the quantitative dimension of the trade-off,we have to allow for two other factors which affect the sizeof the cake available to labour in real terms. These are: (i)the elasticity of the wage bill with respect to output, whichdetermines the trend in the share of labour; and (ii) the priceeffect, depending partly on the rate of inflation and partlyon the movements of producer prices relative to consumer prices.A simple decomposition procedure is outlined in the paper whichallows us to quantify the relative importance of these factors,and hence give a clearer idea of the labour market outcome leaningto one or other of the two interests, employment growth andreal wage growth. The empirical analysis for different regionsof the world is carried out on time series data for the manufacturingsector collected by UNIDO from the national surveys of membercountries for the decades of the 1970s and the 1980s.