Inequality and Income Distribution in Global Value Chains

Global value chains (GVCs), led by transnational corporations (TNCs), have reshaped the world division of labor over the past two decades. GVCs are pervasive in low technology manufacturing, such as textile and apparel, as well as in more advanced industries like automobiles, electronics, and machines. This hierarchical division of labor generates wild competition at the lower value-added stages of production, where low wages and low profit margins prevail for workers and contract manufacturers in developing countries. At the top of the hierarchy another kind of competition prevails, centered on the ability to monitor and control intellectual property rights related to innovation, finance, and marketing. We argue that GVCs have had crucial effects on income inequality and the appropriation of rents in modern capitalism.     

An investigation of the relative efficacy of four alternative approaches to importance-performance analysis

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science - Importance-performance analysis is a tool which has been used in several contexts to transform research results into practical marketing actions. The...     

Continuity properties of the private core

Let be a sequence of differential information economies, converging to a limit differential information economy (written as ). Denote by the set of all ε-private core allocations, ε ≥ 0 (for ε=0 we get the private core of Yannelis (1991), denoted by ). Under appropriate conditions, we prove the following stability results

Job/work environment factors influencing training transfer within a human service agency: some indicative support for Baldwin and Ford’s transfer climate construct

Despite significant progress in the field of training transfer research over the past two decades very little empirical research in the area has been conducted within human service organisations. As a result, our knowledge of the extent to which those factors posited within the training literature to influence the transfer of training are necessarily those found in these particular work settings very much remains in its infancy. This article presents findings from qualitative research that was undertaken as part of a wider training evaluation strategy to investigate (1) those factors which influenced the transfer of training within a UK social services department; and (2) how these factors compared or differed from those suggested within the literature as influencing training transfer. The findings suggest a range of specific factors as they pertain to both the nature of the jobs and the workplace within such work settings as mediating training transfer. However, a number of these were closely associated with the dimensions of social support and opportunity to use as posited within Baldwin and Ford’s (1988) transfer of training model, suggesting that the model is potentially generalisable to human service agencies.     

Old Wine in a New Bottle: Growth Convergence Dynamics in the EU

In this paper, we explore convergence of real per capita output across the European Union (EU) countries, as well as the transitional behavior of possible underlying factors that are responsible for any convergence or divergence pattern. The new panel convergence methodology developed by Phillips and Sul (2007) is employed in a production function growth accounting approach and data from the Total Economy Database and the Total Economy Growth Accounting Database. The empirical findings suggest that the EU countries form two distinct convergent clubs, exhibiting considerable heterogeneity in the underlying growth factors. These findings should help policy makers in designing appropriate growth-oriented programs as well as in setting priorities in their implementation.