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Trade policy is not an employment policy and
should not be expected to have major effects on overall employment
Trade regulation can create jobs in the sectors
it protects or promotes, but almost always at the expense of destroying a
roughly equivalent number of jobs elsewhere in the economy. At a
product-specific or micro level and in the short term, controlling trade
could reduce the offending imports and save jobs, but for the economy as a
whole and in the long term, this has neither theoretical support nor
evidence in its favor. Given that protection may have other—usually
adverse—effects, understanding the difficulties in using it to manage
employment is important for economic policy.
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Workers and policymakers may fear that
privatization leads to job losses and wage cuts, but what’s the empirical
evidence?
Conventional wisdom and prevailing economic
theory hold that the new owners of a privatized firm will cut jobs and
wages. But this ignores the possibility that new owners will expand the
firm’s scale, with potentially positive effects on employment, wages, and
productivity. Evidence generally shows these forces to be offsetting,
usually resulting in small employment and earnings effects and sometimes in
large, positive effects on productivity and scale. Foreign ownership usually
has positive effects, and the effects of domestic privatization tend to be
larger in countries with a more competitive business environment.
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State capture and uneven infrastructure development due to foreign direct investment can outweigh productivity gains
Firms in the new EU member states of Eastern Europe are more productive than those in other transition economies, but with a diminishing advantage. The least productive firms benefit the most from membership, although the situation is reversed in the case of foreign-owned firms. Foreign direct investment fails to promote knowledge and technology spillovers beyond the receiving firms. The dominance of multinational enterprises in the new EU member states enhances the threat of corporate state capture and asymmetric infrastructure development, whilst access to finance remains a constricting issue for all firms.
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The automotive industry has brought economic
growth, but a developmental model based on foreign capital is reaching its
limits
Central Europe has experienced one of the most
impressive growth and convergence stories of recent times. In particular,
this has been achieved on the back of foreign-owned, capital-intensive
manufacturing production in the automotive sector. With large domestic
supplier networks and high skill intensity, the presence of complex industry
yields many economic benefits. However, this developmental path is now
reaching its limits with the exhaustion of the available skilled workforce,
limited investments in upgrading and research, and persistent regional
inequalities.
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More important than defining and measuring
informality is focusing on reducing its detrimental consequences
There are more informal workers than formal
workers across the globe, and yet there remains confusion as to what makes
workers or firms informal and how to measure the extent of it. Informal work
and informal economic activities imply large efficiency and welfare losses,
in terms of low productivity, low earnings, sub-standard working conditions,
and lack of social insurance coverage. Rather than quibbling over
definitions and measures of informality, it is crucial for policymakers to
address these correlates of informality in order to mitigate the negative
efficiency and welfare effects.
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The benefits of trade regulation increase when workers are
mobile
Economists have shown that international trade increases
economic growth, with trade liberalization and integration having characterized the last 50
years. While trade can increase national welfare, recent estimates from both developed and
developing countries show that labor market adjustment costs matter. Regulating trade, defined
as adding or removing tariffs and other trade barriers, is not the best way to help
lower-income workers who suffer from trade-induced losses. Policies that reduce adjustment
costs may increase aggregate welfare more than regulating trade flows does.
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One-company towns concentrate employment but
their ability to adapt to adverse events is often very limited
One-company towns are a relatively rare
phenomenon. Mostly created in locations that are difficult to access, due to
their association with industries such as mining, they have been a marked
feature of the former planned economies. One-company towns typically have
high concentrations of employment that normally provide much of the funding
for local services. This combination has proven problematic when faced with
shocks that force restructuring or even closure. Specific policies for the
redeployment of labor and funding of services need to be in place instead of
subsidies simply aimed at averting job losses.
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The China Shock has challenged economists’
benign view of how trade integration affects labor markets in developed
countries
Economists have long recognized that free trade
has the potential to raise countries’ living standards. But what applies to
a country as a whole need not apply to all its citizens. Workers displaced
by trade cannot change jobs costlessly, and by reshaping skill demands,
trade integration is likely to be permanently harmful to some workers and
permanently beneficial to others. The “China Shock”—denoting China’s rapid
market integration in the 1990s and its accession to the World Trade
Organization in 2001—has given new, unwelcome empirical relevance to these
theoretical insights.
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Policies to increase formal finance to smaller
firms requires improving the functioning of government bureaucracies
Although small- and medium-sized enterprises
(SMEs) represent more than 90% of all enterprises and play an important role
in employment generation, they lack access to affordable formal finance.
Conventionally, market failures and information imperfections are seen as
major causes of this misallocation. However, the role of social and political
factors in resource allocation, including access to formal finance, has
recently become more widely accepted. Firm-level evidence from
post-communist economies, for example, shows that political connectedness
improves access to bank credit, but is not associated with enterprise
growth.
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Does the transition to market economies imply
growing wage inequality and, if so, along what dimensions?
Examining the implications of changes in public
sector wage-setting arrangements due to privatization is a relatively new
area of economics research, with few studies having analyzed the effects of
public sector restructuring on relative wages in developed countries. There
is, however, a growing empirical literature that measures the effects of
transitioning from central planning to market-based systems on
public–private sector wage differentials. Policymakers can learn from this
evidence about the ways in which ownership transformation affects the
distribution of wages in both the public and private employment sectors.
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