Technology and the Decline in Demand for Unskilled Labour

Technology and the Decline in Demand for Unskilled Labour PDF Author: Mark Sanders
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781781959039
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
The position of low skilled workers in the labor market has deteriorated significantly over the past three decades. What has caused this deterioration in low skilled labor demand and what can explain the different labor market responses throughout the OECD? Mark Sanders addresses these questions and evaluates proposed policies to improve upon the present situation and prevent further deterioration in the future. The author develops a theoretical framework that produces two hypotheses to explain the shift in relative demand as well as the different ways in which this shift has manifested itself. The framework is then extended by introducing unemployment, and additional hypotheses are proposed to explain the main EU-US differences. The dynamics thus uncovered yield somewhat unorthodox policy implications on income-, labor market and technology policies in Europe and the US. This comprehensive book will appeal to both scholars and academics, while graduate and PhD-students looking for an accessible introduction to modeling the dynamics of technical change and its interactions with the labor market will find it of great interest.

Technology and the Decline in Demand for Unskilled Labour

Technology and the Decline in Demand for Unskilled Labour PDF Author: Mark Sanders
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781781959039
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
The position of low skilled workers in the labor market has deteriorated significantly over the past three decades. What has caused this deterioration in low skilled labor demand and what can explain the different labor market responses throughout the OECD? Mark Sanders addresses these questions and evaluates proposed policies to improve upon the present situation and prevent further deterioration in the future. The author develops a theoretical framework that produces two hypotheses to explain the shift in relative demand as well as the different ways in which this shift has manifested itself. The framework is then extended by introducing unemployment, and additional hypotheses are proposed to explain the main EU-US differences. The dynamics thus uncovered yield somewhat unorthodox policy implications on income-, labor market and technology policies in Europe and the US. This comprehensive book will appeal to both scholars and academics, while graduate and PhD-students looking for an accessible introduction to modeling the dynamics of technical change and its interactions with the labor market will find it of great interest.

Inequality and the Labor Market

Inequality and the Labor Market PDF Author: Sharon Block
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815738811
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exploring a new agenda to improve outcomes for American workers As the United States continues to struggle with the impact of the devastating COVID-19 recession, policymakers have an opportunity to redress the competition problems in our labor markets. Making the right policy choices, however, requires a deep understanding of long-term, multidimensional problems. That will be solved only by looking to the failures and unrealized opportunities in anti-trust and labor law. For decades, competition in the U.S. labor market has declined, with the result that American workers have experienced slow wage growth and diminishing job quality. While sluggish productivity growth, rising globalization, and declining union representation are traditionally cited as factors for this historic imbalance in economic power, weak competition in the labor market is increasingly being recognized as a factor as well. This book by noted experts frames the legal and economic consequences of this imbalance and presents a series of urgently needed reforms of both labor and anti-trust laws to improve outcomes for American workers. These include higher wages, safer workplaces, increased ability to report labor violations, greater mobility, more opportunities for workers to build power, and overall better labor protections. Inequality in the Labor Market will interest anyone who cares about building a progressive economic agenda or who has a marked interest in labor policy. It also will appeal to anyone hoping to influence or anticipate the much-needed progressive agenda for the United States. The book's unusual scope provides prescriptions that, as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz notes in the introduction, map a path for rebalancing power, not just in our economy but in our democracy.

Technology and the Future of Work

Technology and the Future of Work PDF Author: Adrian Peralta-Alva
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484379705
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 29

Get Book Here

Book Description
This paper uses a DSGE model to simulate the impact of technological change on labor markets and income distribution. It finds that technological advances offers prospects for stronger productivity and growth, but brings risks of increased income polarization. This calls for inclusive policies tailored to country-specific circumstances and preferences, such as investment in human capital to facilitate retooling of low-skilled workers so that they can partake in the gains of technological change, and redistributive policies (such as differentiated income tax cuts) to help reallocate gains. Policies are also needed to facilitate the process of adjustment.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies PDF Author: Erik Brynjolfsson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393239357
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
The big stories -- The skills of the new machines : technology races ahead -- Moore's law and the second half of the chessboard -- The digitization of just about everything -- Innovation : declining or recombining? -- Artificial and human intelligence in the second machine age -- Computing bounty -- Beyond GDP -- The spread -- The biggest winners : stars and superstars -- Implications of the bounty and the spread -- Learning to race with machines : recommendations for individuals -- Policy recommendations -- Long-term recommendations -- Technology and the future (which is very different from "technology is the future").

The Race between Education and Technology

The Race between Education and Technology PDF Author: Claudia Goldin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037731
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century. The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.

Shifting Paradigms

Shifting Paradigms PDF Author: Zia Qureshi
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 081573901X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
Addressing the big questions about how technological change is transforming economies and societies Rapid technological change—likely to accelerate as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic—is reshaping economies and how they grow. But change also causes disruption, creates winners and losers, and produces social stress. This book examines the challenges of digital transformation and suggests how creative policies can make it more productive and inclusive. Shifting Paradigms is the second book on technological change produced by a joint research project of the Brookings Institution and the Korea Development Institute. Contributors are experts from the United States, Europe, and Korea. The first volume, Growth in a Time of Change, was published by Brookings in February 2020. The book's underlying thesis is that the future is arriving faster than expected. Long-accepted paradigms about economic growth are changing as digital technologies transform markets and nearly every aspect of business and work. Change will only intensify with advances in artificial intelligence and other innovations. Investors, business leaders, workers, and public officials face many questions. Is rising market concentration inevitable with the new technologies or can their benefits be more widely shared? How can the promise of FinTech be captured while managing risks? Should workers fear the new automation? Are technology-driven shifts in business and work causing income inequality to rise? How should public policy respond? Shifting Paradigms addresses these questions in an engaging manner for anyone interested in understanding how the economic and social agenda is being transformed by today's winds of change.

The End of Work

The End of Work PDF Author: Jeremy Rifkin
Publisher: Tarcher
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
The most significant domestic issue of the 2004 elections is unemployment. The United States has lost nearly three million jobs in the last ten years, and real employment hovers around 9.1 percent. Only one political analyst foresaw the dark side of the technological revolution and understood its implications for global employment: Jeremy Rifkin. The End of Workis Jeremy Rifkin's most influential and important book. Now nearly ten years old, it has been updated for a new, post-New Economy era. Statistics and figures have been revised to take new trends into account. Rifkin offers a tough, compelling critique of the flaws in the techniques the government uses to compile employment statistics. The End of Workis the book our candidates and our country need to understand the employment challenges-and the hopes-facing us in the century ahead.

Globalization, Technological Change, and Labor Markets

Globalization, Technological Change, and Labor Markets PDF Author: Stanley W. Black
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461549655
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
Globalization, Technological Change and Labor Markets is an edited collection of papers drawn from the conference held at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in June 1997. This conference brought German and American perspectives to bear on the complex issues of global competition, technological change, and labor markets in the welfare state. The contributions are organized into five sections dealing with various aspects of the problem: (1) Macroeconomic Perspectives; (2) Microeconomic Aspects; (3) the German Model of Labor Relations; (4) the Social Market Economy; and (5) Trade Policy and Environmental and Labor Standards. This edited collection seeks to explore many of the key issues surrounding the debate over the impact of globalization and technological change on labor markets in Europe and the United States. `This volume provides path-breaking insights as to why globalization has wreaked havoc on the welfare states that had once propelled Western Europe and North America to an unprecedented standard of living throughout the post-war period. The high level of scholarship contained in the individual chapters forms a compelling argument that will convince even the most resistant skeptics that the days of the classic welfare state are numbered. More importantly, this book is filled with concrete suggestions based on careful economic analysis as to how technological change and globalization can be harnessed in conjunction with a new role of the state to provide a high standard of living.' David B. Audretsch, Ameritech Chair of Economic Development, Indiana University

The Once and Future Worker

The Once and Future Worker PDF Author: Oren Cass
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1641770155
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
“[Cass’s] core principle—a culture of respect for work of all kinds—can help close the gap dividing the two Americas....” – William A. Galston, The Brookings Institution The American worker is in crisis. Wages have stagnated for more than a generation. Reliance on welfare programs has surged. Life expectancy is falling as substance abuse and obesity rates climb. These woes are not the inevitable result of irresistible global and technological forces. They are the direct consequence of a decades-long economic consensus that prioritized increasing consumption—regardless of the costs to American workers, their families, and their communities. Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency focused attention on the depth of the nation’s challenges, yet while everyone agrees something must change, the Left’s insistence on still more government spending and the Right’s faith in still more economic growth are recipes for repeating the mistakes of the past. In this groundbreaking re-evaluation of American society, economics, and public policy, Oren Cass challenges our basic assumptions about what prosperity means and where it comes from to reveal how we lost our way. The good news is that we can still turn things around—if the nation’s proverbial elites are willing to put the American worker’s interests first. Which is more important, pristine air quality, or well-paying jobs that support families? Unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world, or renewed investment in the employment of Americans? Smoothing the path through college for the best students, or ensuring that every student acquires the skills to succeed in the modern economy? Cutting taxes, expanding the safety net, or adding money to low-wage paychecks? The renewal of work in America demands new answers to these questions. If we reinforce their vital role, workers supporting strong families and communities can provide the foundation for a thriving, self-sufficient society that offers opportunity to all.

Technology Differences over Space and Time

Technology Differences over Space and Time PDF Author: Francesco Caselli
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691146020
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Get Book Here

Book Description
Technology Differences over Space and Time looks at how countries use their productive resources—such as workers, skills, equipment and structures, and natural resources. Francesco Caselli develops methods to assess the efficiency with which productive inputs are used, and how these efficiencies vary across countries and over time. Caselli finds that richer countries use skilled workers relatively more efficiently than unskilled workers, and equipment and structures relatively more efficiently than natural resources. They also are relatively more efficient users of labor than of capital. Technological change tends to make countries particularly efficient at using skills and less efficient at using capital. Technical change also favors experienced workers. In order to interpret and understand these findings, Caselli presents a theory of technology choice. In this theory, firms pick technologies that make the most efficient use of the most abundant production factors when these factors are good substitutes for the less abundant factors. Firms pick technologies that make the most of less abundant factors when other suitable factors are not available for substitution. For example, rich countries, where skilled workers are abundant, use skilled workers efficiently, as these are good substitutes for unskilled workers. This flexible framework can be applied to other pairs of inputs, over time, and across countries. Technology Differences over Space and Time has significant implications not only for the theoretical understanding of development and technological innovation, but also for government formulation of industrial policy and multinationals making decisions about what to invest in and where to make those investments.