Measuring and understanding trade in service tasks

The revolution in information and communications technologies has put service tasks with strong tradability characteristics at high risk of being offshored. This article reviews studies proposing indicators of service tradability, exploring the labour market implications of service offshoring and developing theories to rationalize the facts. It suggests that both skill intensity and tradability are determinants of wage and employment effects. Nonetheless, the lack of widely accepted definitions of tradability, the absence of high‐quality data on service trade flows and the difficulty of measuring import competition at higher disaggregation levels pose difficulties in achieving further progress, pointing to areas for future research.     

Foreign trade barriers and jobs in global supply chains

This article uses ILO global supply chain job estimates to study the impact on domestic jobs of foreign barriers to trade in goods and services. Empirical analysis largely confirms predictions derived from a theoretical model calibrated to WIOD data for 2000 and 2011. Barriers to trade in manufacturing and services are both found to have a cross‐border impact on jobs in their own sector and spill‐over effects in other sectors, the latter becoming stronger over time. This article shows the labour market consequences of the increased interconnectedness of countries and sectors through global supply chains, which suggests that trade policy can have significant external effects on foreign labour markets.     

International trade,labour migrations and capital flows: long-term evidence for Australia,Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States

The historical links between international factor mobility and the extent of international trade are analysed over the long term for three high labour immigration countries (Australia, Canada and the United States) and one high labour emigration country (the United Kingdom).
Time series data are used. Current international openness is assessed relative to this experience. International factor market integration has increased over time with trade liberalization, suggesting that traditional Hecksher-Ohlin thinking cannot be readily used to account for long-term trends in several important economies.
Both trade and factor mobility have an episodic character that makes it misleading to assess current international openness only in terms of post-World War 2 economic trends.     

Assessment of the distributive impact of national trade reforms in Brazil

This paper quantifies the distributional and poverty effects of trade liberalization in Brazil using household survey data. We estimate the consumption and labor impact of Mercosur trade reform following the methodology suggested by Porto (J Int Econ 70:140–160, 2006) and Nicita (J Dev Econ 89(1):19–27, 2009). Results show that trade liberalization had a pro-poor effect in Brazil. This result is largely explained by two major observations: the fact that consumption good prices decreased after Brazil entered Mercosur and a close to zero labor income effect. We find that poverty decreased after national trade liberalization (both for women and men). Additionally, we obtained no significant inequality effects after national trade reforms.     

Employment effects of trade in intermediate and final goods: An empirical assessment

The steady growth of international trade in intermediate goods and services has made the relationship between trade and the international division of labour more complex. For 39 countries, the author decomposes the employment effects of international trade into five components, namely, the labour content of – or employment generated by – (1) exports; (2) imports; (3) the import content of exports; (4) the export content of imports; and (5) the third‐country import content of imports. He shows that in 2009, trade in intermediate goods accounted for some 88 million jobs – 14 per cent of all jobs generated by international trade – while the import content of exports accounted for 44 million jobs.     

FINANCIAL AND INSURANCE SERVICES TRADE: DOES EXCHANGE RATE OR INCOME MATTER?

This paper aims to investigate the impacts of exchange rate and income changes on financial and insurance services trade by utilizing the quarterly bilateral trade data of the United States and its major trading partners from 2003 to 2017. No long‐run exchange rate effects on imports and exports of insurance services trade are found. The impact of exchange rates on insurance services may be weak since competition among service providers depends on product differentiation than on exchange rates. On the contrary, income demonstrates significant impacts on both financial and insurance services trade in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and Australia. (JEL C22, F14, G20)     

Trade and jobs in Europe: The role of mode 5 service exports

Over the past two decades, EU employment supported by extra‐EU exports of goods and services has increased markedly, with a shift towards jobs supported by services exported as part of manufactured goods. The authors seek further insight into this trend through the full decomposition of trade flows using a multi‐regional input–output model and the World Input–Output Database for 40 countries and 35 industries over the period 1995–2011. Their findings call for reflection by policy‐makers regarding the four traditional modes of service supply under the General Agreement on Trade in Services with a view to adequately capturing this new reality in global trade.     

INTERNATIONAL TAX COMPETITION AND THE DEFICIT BIAS

I analyze the dynamic effects of tax competition on public budget deficits. I find that stronger tax competition leads to a fiscal deficit bias at the early stages of financial liberalization. When countries differ in terms of capital mobility, further liberalization leads to external imbalances and diverging fiscal deficits while corporate tax rates converge. Consistent with theory, I find that stronger tax competition increases deficits in a sample of OECD countries, controlling for tax revenues and other standard determinants of fiscal deficits. (JEL E62, F62)     

Erhöht Globalisierung die Ungleichheit der Einkommen?

The article tests the thesis that globalization increases the earnings inequality of households. It extends the time series data set of Alderson and Nielsen (2002) who supported the globalization thesis. Alternative models provide no evidence that foreign trade, foreign investment, and migration increase inequality. The article gives reasons for these results and shows that OECD countries pass through an endogenous sectoral and demographic crisis in the transition to post-industrial service societies. Therefore, the paper adapts Kuznets’ theorem of sector dualism to the subsectors of the service economy. The polarization of value addition within the service sector appears as the crucial determinant of increased earnings inequality of households.     

The labour share of income: heterogeneous causes for parallel movements?

The distribution of factor incomes from a macroeconomic perspective is an increasingly popular research topic—be it for its implications for the personal income distribution or the apparent mistake in previous research declaring it to be constant over time. The labour share has been decreasing across OECD countries since the 1980s, sparking a renewed interest in what is behind this trend. The aim of this paper is to take a systematic approach to estimating the coefficients of factors explaining these movements across countries. In particular, we focus on proper dynamic model specification and test the validity of the homogeneity assumption of slope coefficients frequently implied in previous studies. We employ fixed effect estimators as well as pooled mean group and mean group estimators, the latter in a dynamic heterogeneous panel framework. We find support for a dynamic estimation setup and derive statements regarding the homogeneity assumption with respect to the three most prominent explanatory variables in the literature: the capital-output ratio, total factor productivity and trade openness. We find the first two variables to decrease the labour share, to be better captured by dynamic estimators and to be better identified in more recent time periods. With regard to trade, we see it depressing the labour share since 1980 only. We furthermore provide evidence on increased cross-country homogeneity over time for all of the analysed driving forces of the labour share.     

服务经济发展对金融监管制度的要求研究

服务经济环境下,金融业发展呈现出金融手段信息化、金融发展自由化等特征,对金融监管提出了更高的要求。金融监管的核心要解决好两大关系,即金融自由化与金融监管、金融创新与金融监管的关系。我国传统金融监管与当前服务经济发展的要求存在一定的差异,应借鉴国外服务经济先行国家金融监管的经验与教训,结合中国服务经济发展的实践要求,构建国内金融监管制度和先行试点。     

On the materiality of service work

This article argues that retail service work is characterised by engagement with material products. Retail sales assistants work to create the shop as a site of consumption, and to create the products for sale as desirable objects for consumption. This is more important than the customer service interactions that are often seen as characterising service work. In making the argument for the centrality of the material in retail work, the article takes issue with conceptions of the service sector that emphasise its difference from other economic sectors, and with research into service work that focuses on interaction to the exclusion of other elements of the labour process. It calls for a more nuanced, contextualised understanding of the service sector that acknowledges the difference between sub‐sectors.     

The insufficiency of fairness: The logics of homeless service administration and resulting gaps in service

This paper reports on discursive justifications of homeless service institutions in the USA, illustrating a conceptualization of service founded on economic logics of industry and the marketplace. Emerging from ethnographic data, we found that homeless service administrators utilized economic logics of justification to legitimize the exclusion of the street homeless by framing delivery within western notions of fair exchange and efficient production. When these logics are used exclusively to frame justifiable criteria for receiving services, certain people are empowered to participate in social welfare institutions, while others are disfranchised. We conclude that addressing gaps in service requires legitimizing varied administrative models, which, although underpinned by different, perhaps even oppositional, justifications, will engender a service sector responsive to the diversity of the homeless population.     

Young subjectivities and affective labour in the service economy

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour.     

The relationship between youth employment and older persons' employment in 20 OECD countries

Inspired by the “lump of labour” theory, a large number of OECD countries have encouraged the expansion of early retirement policies in response to rising unemployment since the 1970s. In reality, however, youth employment is found to be positively correlated with older persons' employment, although this is simply the overall finding for all OECD countries because most studies estimate average effects. Less is known about diversity in the relationship between youth employment and the employment of older workers. In order to help fill the research gap in this area, this study explores the heterogeneity of that relationship across 20 OECD countries.     

Migration Policy and Industrial Structure: The Case of Switzerland

Structural change in OECD countries, emphasizing knowledge‐based sectors, has led to an increasing demand for highly skilled labour. One means of meeting this demand has been to implement a selective immigration policy. Such policies, however, have been criticized for channelling labour into low‐producing sectors and occupations, hampering structural change. Proponents of such criticism point to Switzerland's former policy of channelling immigrants into so‐called seasonal sectors, a practice abandoned in the early 1990s, as having contributed to Switzerland's low growth rates. To assess this, we here analyse the amended migration policy's effects on skill structure and sectoral distribution of immigration flows using data from the Swiss Census of 1990 and 2000 to determine whether the new policy has led to an immigrant inflow more adapted to the processes of structural change. We find that the share of highly skilled immigrants has increased notably under the new migration policy. Our analysis also shows an important change in the sectoral focus of the new arrival inflow. Not only have fewer immigrants been entering declining sectors, but the majority of migrants arriving under the new policy regime have been absorbed into growing and knowledge‐based sectors, meaning they are employed primarily in service and knowledge‐intensive sectors. Overall, the analysis provides ample evidence that the current admission policy as ositively contributed to tructural change in Switzerland.     

Mode 4 trade in services: promoting temporary labour mobility via the trade détour?

A comprehensive process of the liberalisation of trade and capital flows notwithstanding, neoliberal globalisation has not been equally successful in freeing the international movement of labour. With the General Agreement on Trade in Services, (GATS), the WTO set up a novel legal framework within the domain of trade politics that includes the cross-border movement of natural persons to deliver services, labelled Mode 4, thus aiming at the promotion of temporary labour mobility. This article seeks to explain the emergence of Mode 4 and its subsequent development as the outcome of a particular politics of scale motivated by the interests of transnational capital as well as the strategic selectivity of specific institutional terrains. The result has been a compromise that restricts Mode 4 liberalisation to highly qualified personnel only.     

THE WELFARE IMPACT OF TRADE LIBERALIZATION

This paper analyzes the distributional welfare impact of trade liberalization reforms on heterogeneous households. We develop a static applied general equilibrium model, and using a Social Accounting Matrix and Household Expenditure Survey, we calibrate it to match Slovenian data. We simulate the case of Slovenia joining the EU and quantify its welfare impact on households that differ in terms of age, income, and education. Additionally, we compare this benchmark case with two alternative scenarios: (1) a free trade agreement between Slovenia and the EU and (2) a custom union arrangement where tariff revenues are rebated proportionally to the households. We find that while trade liberalization leads to falling consumer prices, increased production in the export sectors, and aggregate welfare gains, the differentiated welfare impacts across heterogeneous households vary in their degrees. (JEL D58, F14, F15)     

The effect of alternative staff time data collection methods on drug treatment service cost estimates

Although a limited number of service cost estimates exist, no study has evaluated how differences in the method used to collect the staff time allocation across treatment services contribute to differences in service cost estimates. Three alternative data collection methods for estimating service-level costs in methadone treatment programs were evaluated: key informants, staff surveys, and staff diaries. We analyzed data from 25 methadone clinics across the United States. Results indicate that for the three primary services offered at methadone clinics—individual counseling, group counseling, and methadone dosing—no statistically significant differences exist in the mean estimates of costs per session across programs. Of the other five services analyzed, we found no statistically significant differences in two of the mean costs per session and a small but statistically significant difference in another service. We found large and statistically significant differences in mean costs for two services, initial patient assessment and initial medical services. Although there is no gold standard available to judge which method is the best to use, we concluded that the key informant method yields more reliable cost estimates compared with the staff methods and is less burdensome to both the treatment programs and to researchers. Our findings suggest that the key informant method is the preferred method for costing substance abuse treatment services.