Fiscal stimulus and labor market dynamics in Japan

The paper studies the effects of fiscal expansion on the Japanese labor market. First, using a structural VAR model, we find that the unemployment rate falls and employment rises following an increase in government spending. We also find that fiscal expansion affects flows in and out of unemployment. While an increase in government spending increases the job-finding rate, it reduces the separation rate. We then incorporate search and matching frictions into a standard dynamic general equilibrium model, and study whether the model can explain what we observed in data. While the model fails to predict the exact size of the impact of government spending shocks on the Japanese labor market variables, it can consistently capture the empirical pattern of responses of labor market variables to shocks.     

农业部门劳动力再配置、农村非农化与中国农村经济增长

文章通过在二元经济增长模型中引入内生经济增长思想的基础上,构建了一个能够较好地对中国农村经济增长进行模拟和解释的理论模型.整个模型将中国农村经济增长划分为传统农业阶段、非农产业发展阶段与"反哺"阶段三个时间段,并着重分析了农业剩余的出现与非农产业的发展,这也是中国农村经济改革之所以成功最为重要的一段时期.文章最终认为,农村经济发展的最终目的应该是促进农业与非农产业的协调发展,以推进社会主义新农村建设、构建社会主义和谐社会.     

Changing Women's Lives: Child Care Policy in Ireland

Child care as a policy issue has been forced to the center of the national planning agenda in Ireland with the report of an expert working group on child care. As Ireland has broken into the ranks of wealthy Western economies, Irish women have joined the formal workforce in ever greater numbers, dramatically breaking the traditional ideology of women as childbearers and homemakers. However, women are now carrying the double burden of work that accompanies the lack of any state policy on child care. This article traces this recent history of the feminizing of the Irish workforce, amidst a fast-changing social context for family life, and the multiple problems confronting the expert working group of securing an adequate range of policies for the provision of child care in a country which has one of the lowest rates of formal state provision in the entire European Union.     

The development of the Indonesian labour movement

The paper examines the development of the labour movement in Indonesia in the context of trade unionism elsewhere in the area of the Asia-Pacific region. The Indonesian labour movement is shown to exhibit a dual nature; consisting of an official sponsored and legal form of unionism, and an independent, quasi-illegal form of unionism. The two have a conflicting yet symbiotic relationship, where the state plays a very significant role in determining the parameters for behaviour in industrial relations. Although the form of state intervention in Indonesia may be different from state intervention in other comparable countries, its aims are broadly similar. In this context the Indonesian independent labour movement is shown to have had some measure of success in resisting the restrictions placed upon it in its attempt to advance its members' terms and conditions of employment.     

The first wave of the Soviet oil offensive: The Anglo-American Alliance and the flow of ‘Red Oil’ to Finland during the 1950s

During the 1950s, many observers regarded the expansion of Soviet oil exports as a serious threat to Western political and economic interests. Finland was the first non-communist European country that started to buy Soviet oil on a large scale. This made the country vulnerable to Soviet political pressure. An examination of the Finnish case indicates that Anglo-American governments adopted a much more complex attitude towards the emergence of the Soviet Union as an exporter of oil than the Cold War rhetoric would suggest. The US and British governments were not automatically willing to support their oil companies or to try to block Soviet oil exports. Instead of seeing Soviet oil exports to Finland simply as a threat to Western interests, the Foreign Office and the State Department considered the precise implications that Finnish purchases of Soviet oil would have on Western strategic interests on a case-by-case basis. Many other government departments were more interested in promoting their own departmental interests.     

Flexible work practices and human resource management: a comparison of South African and foreign owned companies

This study compares the use of flexible work practices in wholly owned South African (SA) companies with that in foreign-owned companies. Data were obtained from questionnaire results of a study conducted by Horwitz and Franklin (1996) of flexible work practices in SA organizations. The questionnaire was used as part of a collaborative research project involving three countries (Brosnan et al ., 1996). It was found that SA-owned companies use certain flexible work practices to a lesser extent than foreign-owned companies. This was found to be the case particularly in the use of numerical forms of flexibility, such as sub-contractors/consultants and the use of temporary employees. Use of subcontractors/consultants and temporary staff agencies was found to be the greatest in partially foreign-owned companies. A larger proportion of foreign-owned companies have lower labour costs than do SA-owned companies. This has, however, not been as a result of the greater use of flexible work practices. Foreign-owned companies make more joint decisions with unions than do SA-owned companies when changing work practices.     

对知识失业的经济学思考

“知识失业”是指受过高等教育的劳动力处于不得其用的一种状态。在我国经济发展的现阶段,“知识失业”现象也开始浮现。本文从经济学供给和需求的角度对我国的“知识失业”产生的原因进行了分析,并提出了有针对性的对策建议。     

Labor supply in urban China

Using labor supply responses from 10,560 urban Chinese workers, two-stage least squares estimations identify positive compensated wage effects and negative income effects that are, for the most part, statistically significant. The gross wage effects are mostly positive but they indicate relatively low uncompensated labor supply elasticities. The compensated wage effects are much larger; these may be important in assessing the labor market consequences of reform policies that monetize non-pecuniary benefits. The significance of labor supply responses depends on individual responsibilities within the family; the effects are largest for women and non-household heads. Journal of Comparative Economics 31 (4) (2003) 795–817.     

Labor productivity, wages, nationality, and foreign ownership shares in Thai manufacturing, 1996–2000

This paper compares labor productivity and wages among nationality and ownership groups of foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) and local plants in Thai manufacturing for 1996, 1998, and 2000. Disaggregating foreign MNCs by nationality or foreign ownership share revealed a few significant differences in both labor productivity and wages that were not present in more aggregate specifications. In these cases, there was a weak tendency for MNCs from Europe, Japan, and the United States to have relatively high labor productivity and wages, for wholly-foreign MNCs to have relatively high labor productivity, and for majority- and wholly-foreign MNCs to pay relatively high wages. However, these results suggest that the relationships among labor productivity or wages, on the one hand, and nationality or foreign ownership shares, on the other hand, were generally weak in Thai manufacturing. These results are also consistent with those of previous studies in suggesting that the relationship between labor productivity and foreign ownership in general was also rather weak, though the relationship between wages and foreign ownership was somewhat stronger.     

劳动力城乡统筹的政治经济学分析

从政治经济学的角度看，劳动力价值是由其成本决定的，并受市场供求关系的影响。研究发现，与农村劳动力再生产成本相比，农村劳动力价格过低。原因在于：一是劳动力市场总量供过于求；二是劳动力市场在结构上处于一种分割状态，从属劳动力市场大量低素质劳动力的存在导致了这部分市场供给严重过剩，劳动力价格难以提升。要打破市场分割，必须加大对农村人力资本的投入，提高劳动者价值。