The great Canadian recovery: The impact of COVID-19 on Canada's labour market

The Canadian labour market experienced a period of unprecedented turmoil following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze the main changes using standard labour force statistics and new data on job postings. Envisaging a phase of temporary severing of employment relationships followed by a phase of more standard labour market search and matching, we use stock and flow data to understand key developments. We find dramatic changes in employment, unemployment and labour market attachment in the first few months of the pandemic and a broad though gradual recovery through to the end of 2021.     

Essential agriculture,sacrificial labor,and the COVID-19 pandemic in the US South

As farmworkers were reframed as “essential” workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, US growers demanded unfettered access to foreign farm labor. After initially announcing a freeze on all immigration processing, the Trump administration bowed to farmers' demands, granting a single exception for agricultural guestworkers under the H-2A visa program. Through a focus on H-2A farmworkers in Georgia, this paper highlights how the pandemic exacerbated farm labor conditions in the US South. The author interrogates these conditions through the lens of racial capitalism, exposing the legacies of plantation political economies and a longstanding agricultural labor system premised on devaluing racialized labor. These histories are obscured by the myth of agricultural exceptionalism—the idea that agriculture is too different and important to be subject to the same rules and regulations as other industries. Agricultural exceptionalism naturalizes the racial capitalist system and informs state responses that privilege agricultural production through the exploitation of farmworkers, remaking “essential” farmworkers as sacrificial labor.     

Proposal and validation of a financial protection perception scale

This article proposes and validates a financial protection perception scale (FPPS) from the perspective of the financial services consumer. The scale was applied to a sample of 1137 individuals residing in Brazil and validated using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and standard multivariate validation methods. The FPPS, composed of 14 items, allows the development of an indicator that defines the level of protection perceived by the consumer of financial services, evaluated along the dimensions of transparency, suitability, security, and complaints. The tests and fit indices indicated the reliability and validity of the FPPS. With this scale, researchers, managers, and policymakers can assess the extent to which consumers feel protected when using financial services.     

‘They tell us after they've decided things’: A cross-country analysis of unions and digitalisation in retail

The role of trade unions in the social shaping of digital technologies is a vital question for research, public policy and social justice. This article draws on interviews with two unions in the grocery retail sector in the United Kingdom and Norway, and examines their involvement in technology decisions, and whether they can shape better outcomes for workers. By comparing a ‘neo-liberal’ economy and a ‘Nordic welfare state’, the article considers whether stronger institutional power and regulatory supports in Norway provide for greater influence in a sector regarded as challenging for unions. The findings indicate relatively few country differences and help shed light on the factors that enable and constrain unions’ role in digitalisation.     

Twenty-five years of Living Under Contract: Contract farming and agrarian change in the developing world

The expansion of contract farming schemes through regions of the developing world in the era of the globalization of agriculture raises questions that are central to the study of agrarian political economy. Contract farming has extended the footprint of commodity production and integrated land and labour not otherwise captured in forms of direct production and marketing. 25 years after the publication of Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, a foundational collection edited by Peter Little and Michael Watts, it is necessary to take stock of the most prominent developments in the practice of contract farming and in the political economy literature studying it. The ultimate contribution of Living Under Contract was framing contract farming as expressing the unevenness of power relations in agriculture and grounding it in specific political, historical and social contexts that were not examined in the mainstream accounts. This introduction to the special issue revisits the questions that have remained relevant or re-emerged in the political economy literature on contract farming; it raises new questions that reflect contemporary developments and it explains how the papers in this collection contribute to the expansion of the theoretical and empirical horizons of the research on contemporary contract farming in low and middle-income countries.     

Paying for ecological services in Ecuador: The political economy of structural inequality

Paying Indigenous communities to conserve land for carbon sequestration is a controversial way of tackling climate change. Critics argue that paying for ecological services (or ‘PES’) in the form of carbon offset programmes reduces land and social relations to an economic transaction that devalues Indigenous livelihoods and communities. At the same time, empirical studies have shown that Indigenous communities have accepted and even embraced the idea of being paid to conserve land for climate change mitigation. This paper explores this apparent contradiction by investigating the implementation of Programa Socio Bosque (PSB), a PES carbon sequestration programme in Ecuador. Drawing upon primary fieldwork in the highland province of Chimborazo, it makes the case that PES programmes need to be understood as form of state power that reconfigures and reinforces the ways in which Indigenous peoples engage with the state. Particularly important in this regard is the role of the state in reinforcing the agrarian conditions under which Indigenous communities use and interpret PES payments while at the same time reconfiguring new forms of land conservation. Empirically, the research reveals important complementarities between the goals of carbon sequestration PES programmes and Indigenous land-use practices. Methodologically, it highlights the importance of situating the study of PES programmes in a context of land struggles, community–state relations and agrarian change.     

Contract farming and everyday acts of resistance: Oil palm contract farmers in the Philippines

Contract violations are critical issues determining the success and sustainability of contract farming (CF). This paper challenges the common portrayal of the “powerful” company versus the “powerless” landowners/smallholders by using the literature on labour agency in global value chains to understand minor contract violations of contract farmers such, as side-selling, refusal to harvest, and burning/felling of oil palm trees. This paper conceptualizes these violations as acts of minor agency or everyday acts of resistance. The analysis highlights how CF has created chains of dependency, in which smallholders are integrated into the modern market economy through new relations of debt and power. In response, contract farmers attempt to influence and shape the CF relation by using these different acts of minor agency. This paper finds that acts of minor agency, in the aggregate, can have important effects on contract relations, governance, and organizational structure of the chain and has the potential to lead to broader changes in the underlying social relations of contract. It highlights how individual acts of minor agency may contribute to the development of a consciousness of collective opposition to the contract relation.     

Ramsey rule with forward/backward utility for long-term yield curves modeling

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This paper draws a parallel between the economic and financial points of view in the modeling of long-term yield curves and provides new results on asymptotic...