Business history,global networks and the future of mobility

Globalisation raises serious concerns about ecological sustainability and social equality. This article proposes that business historians should write a usable past that is framed by the imperative of addressing these issues. The transport and communication networks that underpin global trade and travel offer an opportunity to narrate such a past. In particular business enterprises have historically helped to shape the ways consumers think about and realise bodily movement. By contributing to a genealogy of these mobility cultures, business historians can help to uncover the mythic traces that continued to shape contemporary public and policy understandings of global mobility.     

Books and publications received

ABSTRACT

Economic theory predicts that regional wages will converge as transport and communication technologies bring labour markets together. An exploration of this transition from labour market segmentation to unification requires long-term evidence of nominal wages and cost of living by region. This paper presents new evidence of wages for male manufacturing workers and cost-of-living indices across 24 Swedish counties between 1860 and 2009. Our findings indicate that the Swedish regional wage differentials were a great deal larger in the 1860s than in the 2000s. Most of the compression took place between the 1860s and World War I, as well as in the 1930s and during World War II. Differences in expenditures on housing impact on our assessment of convergence in the post-World War II decades: the nominal measure declines, while the real one stays constant. Our concluding discussion engages with the assumption that before World War I, regional wage convergence was associated with labour mobility, spurred by improved communication and transportation technologies as well as by the implementation of modern employment contracts. In the 1930s and 1940s, in contrast, regional wage convergence can be traced to high unionisation and centralised collective bargaining in the labour market, two distinguishing features of the Swedish Model.     

东西合作研究述评

东西合作是区域协调发展的大问题,因此近年来备受学界关注。文章对东西合作的内涵与外延,东西合作的形式、内容、领域和重点等问题给予了梳理。最后就东西合作亟待深化的问题提出了一些看法。     

Intra-metropolitan shifts in labor demand and the adjustment of local markets

I offer new evidence on the adjustment of local labor markets to geographic shifts in labor demand within US metropolitan areas using a unique data set in which metropolitan subregions are geographically matched across the 1970–1980 and 1980–1990 decades. The evidence uncovered paints the following picture. Workers, especially those with less education, make incomplete adjustments within metropolitan areas in response to intra-metropolitan demand shifts. Although blacks may not make especially limited adjustments, they have disproportionately suffered deleterious effects from job movements because the demand shifts have tended to be away from their places of residence.     

资源移动性与企业战略相关问题

产品与需求是企业广义的资源 ,产品和需求移动性的大小是决定和改变产业结构和相应产业竞争规则的重要因素 ,为企业带来了一系列战略问题。此外 ,企业各种重要资源的移动性也是企业需要分析和把握的战略问题。     

Saving–investment correlations, capital mobility and crowding out: some further results

This study attempts to reassess the evidence on the degree of capital mobility and crowding out by applying a varying coefficients model to data on 19 OECD countries over the 1971–1999 period. Our period-specific results strongly support the crowding-out effect as well as the low capital mobility argument for this group of countries as a whole. However, the strength of the crowding-out effect appears to weaken and the degree of capital mobility to increase in the 1990s as compared to the 1970s and 1980s. We also classify countries into five groups according to the relative size of the government sector. Our group-specific results indicate that the degree of capital mobility is generally lower and the crowding-out effect generally stronger, in country groups with smaller governments. The differences are especially evident when we compare the group with largest government size with all other groups, those differences between the latter being much more modest. However, significant differences in the country-specific results suggest that it is prudent to be cautious when we draw conclusions about crowding-out and capital mobility for specific countries from the period-wise or group-wise results. This is particularly important in drawing policy implications for specific countries.     

第三代移动通信系统中用户移动性模型的研究

本文在研究第三代移动通信系统特点和分析UMTS标准模型与可扩展模型的优缺点的基础上，建立了适用于第三代移动通信系统的综合模型，研究和分析了不同类型用户情况下该综合模型的信道占用时间，并给出了仿真结果。