ECONOMIC TRANSITION AND LABOUR MARKET DYNAMICS IN CHINA: AN INTERPRETATIVE SURVEY OF THE ‘TURNING POINT’ DEBATE

Has the Chinese economy approached the ‘Lewisian turning point’ that marks the ending of the initial phase of industrial transformation fuelled by surplus labour? In this paper we undertake an interpretative survey of the literature on this issue, in the context of China's labour market conditions prior to the reforms and structural change of the past three decades. The available evidence is mixed, and our assessment makes a strong case for probing institutional constraints to labour mobility from an economy‐wide perspective, going beyond the confines of the rural economy.     

Inefficiency and heterogeneity in Turkish banking: 1990–2000

Recent studies have stressed the importance of privatization and openness to foreign competition for bank efficiency and economic growth. We study bank efficiency in Turkey, an emerging economy with great heterogeneity in bank types and ownership structures. Earlier studies of Turkish banking had three limitations: (i) excessive reliance on cost‐function frontier analyses, wherein volume of loans is a measure of banking output; (ii) pooling all banks or imposing ad hoc heterogeneity assumptions; and (iii) lack of a comprehensive panel data set for proper analysis of productivity and heterogeneity. We use an estimation–classification procedure to find likelihood‐driven classification of bank technologies in an 11‐year panel. In addition, we augment traditional cost‐frontier analysis with a labour‐efficiency analysis. We conclude that state banks are not particularly inefficient overall, but that they do utilize labour inefficiently. This partially supports recent calls for privatization. We also conclude that special finance houses (or Islamic banks) utilize the same technology as conventional domestic banks, and do so relatively efficiently. This suggests that they do not cause harm to the financial system. Finally, we conclude that foreign banks utilize a different technology from domestic ones. This suggests that one should not overstate their value to the financial sector. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The economy of Portugal within the European Union: 1990–2002

This article analyzes the impact of the EU on Portugal’s economy, how the EU rules and regulations have affected the country’s policy-making style, and the impact of EU’s transfer of resources. It shows that Portugal has greatly benefitted from joining the EU: the rapid exposure to foreign competition has forced modernization of many sectors; there was a retreat of the state from direct involvement in economic activities and the creation of a number of new export-oriented sectors, and EU transfers were effectively applied in modernizing the country’s infrastructure. However, increased productivity has not improved equity from both an income distribution point of view and from regional income concentration.     

Spatial interactions among U.S. cities: 1900–1990

We test implications of economic geography by exploring spatial interactions among U.S. cities. We use a data set consisting of 1900–1990 metro area populations, and spatial measures including distance from the nearest larger city in a higher-tier, adjacency, and location within U.S. regions. We also date cities from their time of settlement. We find that among cities which enter the system, larger cities are more likely to locate near other cities. Moreover, older cities are more likely to have neighbors. Distance from the nearest higher-tier city is not always a significant determinant of size and growth. We find no evidence of persistent non-linear effects on urban growth of either size or distance, although distance is important for city size for some years.     

Membership patterns in USDAW 1980–1990: survival as success?

This research note examines the pattern of union membership growth in USDAW during 1980 to 1990. The union's recruitment strategies, campaigns at local and national level, and the effect of changes in the labour market such as recent equal value judgements are examined with respect to changes in membership levels.     

HUMAN CAPITAL AND URBAN GROWTH IN ITALY, 1981–2001

Over the last decades of the XX century, human capital has emerged as a critical source of agglomeration economies fueling urban growth in advanced economies. Focusing on the Italian case, this paper assesses the contribution of human capital to urban growth, the latter gauged by employment growth between 1981 and 2001. A 10% higher share of college‐educated residents prompted a higher growth in employment in the 0.5–2.2% range. These results hold controlling for a wide set of urban characteristics and using an instrumental variable approach. By exploiting a spatial localization model, we disentangle the estimated effect into two components related to higher productivity and to higher life quality, respectively. We found that the former contributed to more than 60% of the effect at municipal level, and to over 90% at the wider local labor market level.     

TRADE UNIONS AND THE DISPERSION OF EARNINGS IN BRITISH ESTABLISHMENTS, 1980–90†

ABSTRACT The relationship between unions and earnings dispersion is examined using establishment-level data from the 1980, 1984 and 1990 Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys. Initially the cross-sectional relationship is examined using the 1990 data. The earnings dispersion of skilled and semiskilled workers is seen to be lower across unionized establishments than across non-union establishments; secondly, within-establishment earnings dispersion is lower in plants which recognize trade unions for collective bargaining purposes than in those that do not. All three surveys are then utilized to ascertain to what extent the decline in unionization in Britain has contributed to the rise in earnings inequality of semi-skilled workers. There was a sizeable and important widening of the gap in the dispersion of earnings across union and non-union plants between 1980 and 1990. For semi-skilled earnings, the decline in the share of plants with recognized unions can account for 11-17 percent of the rise in earnings inequality over this time period. The importance of falling union activity (as measured by union recognition) seemed to accelerate through the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1984 the relatively small falls in aggregate recognition explain less than 10 percent of the inequality increase, whereas between 1984 and 1990 about one-quarter of the increase can be accounted for by the fall in unionization. The majority of the rise in earnings inequality is, however, due to a large increase in earnings dispersion across non-union establishments.