Labour Market Shocks and the Demand for Trade Protection: Evidence from Online Surveys

2020 ◽  
Vol 130 (628) ◽  
pp. 1008-1030 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Di Tella ◽  
Dani Rodrik

Abstract We study preferences for government action in response to layoffs resulting from different types of labour-market shocks. We consider: technological change, a demand shift, bad management and three kinds of international outsourcing. Support for government intervention rises sharply in response to shocks and is heavily biased towards trade protection. Trade shocks generate more demand for protectionism and, among trade shocks, outsourcing to a developing country elicits greater demand for protectionism. The ‘bad management’ shock is the only scenario that induces a desired increase in compensatory transfers. Trump supporters are more protectionist than Clinton supporters, but preferences seem easy to manipulate: Clinton supporters primed with trade shocks are as protectionist as baseline Trump voters. Highlighting labour abuses in the exporting country increases the demand for trade protection by Clinton supporters but not Trump supporters.

Author(s):  
John Toye

Keynes’s writings are often disregarded in the context of economic development, overlooking that Russia was a developing country in his lifetime. He wrote about the experimental economic techniques that the Soviet government employed. He visited Russia three times and wrote A Short View of Russia in which he explained and criticized Bolsheviks’ policy of export and import monopolies, an overvalued exchange rate, inflationary government finance, and the subsidization of industry. These were policies that many developing countries adopted after decolonization. Keynes’s conclusion was that they were inefficient and that ‘bourgeois economics was valid in a communist country’. Did Keynes change his mind in the 1930s? If anything, he grew more harshly critical of Soviet economic policies and carefully distinguished them from his own endorsement of moderate trade protection and government supplementary investment in times of depression.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Ravazzolo ◽  
Josué Diwambuena
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
pp. 095001702094666
Author(s):  
Senhu Wang ◽  
Adam Coutts ◽  
Brendan Burchell ◽  
Daiga Kamerāde ◽  
Ursula Balderson

Active Labour Market Programmes (ALMPs), which form important components of employment support policies around the world, have been found to improve mental health and wellbeing of participants. However, it remains unclear how these health effects compare with the effects of different types of employment for men and women. Using 1991–2019 panel data in the UK, we find that unemployed women derive similar mental health benefits from ALMPs compared with employment. Unemployed men also benefit from ALMPs but obtain significantly more health benefits from formal employment. Such benefits are particularly pronounced in full-time, permanent and upper/middle-status jobs. Further analyses reveal that programmes that deliver human capital training have larger mental health benefits than employment assistance ALMPs. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of the mental health impacts of ALMPs compared with different types of employment, and highlight the need for a more gender-sensitive design in labour market interventions.


Author(s):  
Önder Nomaler ◽  
Bart Verspagen ◽  
Adriaan van Zon

This chapter addresses the relationship between structural change and the income distribution. It raises the question of whether structural change increases or decreases income inequality. The chapter presents a multi-sectoral model in the so-called canonical modelling tradition. In this model the distributional outcomes depend on the mix of the labour supply in different technology classes and skill biases in technological change. Whether structural change has an effect depends on the specific country. When it does have an effect, it mainly benefits high-skilled labour. The skill premium for high-skilled labour thus contributes to increased income inequality. Both the relative supply of skills and skill-based technological change tend to increase income inequality, though not in all countries.


2001 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Günther Schmid

This article develops the concept of ‘transitional labour markets': legitimised and collectively insured sets of mobility options between paid and unpaid work. Such mobility options could constitute a basis for both a new gender contract and a new concept of full-employment, the latter being based on the flexible target of 30 hours a week, from which employees would constantly deviate over their life course to allow for periods of training, child-care, higher-income phases etc. Of five different types of transitional labour market, this article focuses on the transition between paid and unpaid work and between work and retirement. Greater flexibility in the mobility between various labour market statuses, it is argued, would make a major contribution to overcoming gender inequality.


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