Download or read book Labour Finance and Inequality written by Suzanne J. Konzelmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the 2008 "global" financial crisis, the viability of globalised financial capitalism was called into question. The resulting fear and uncertainty produced a momentary return to "Keynesian" policies. But as soon as emergency stimuli – and bank bail-outs – appeared to stabilise the situation, there was a sharp reversal; and successive British governments and the financial sector have since attempted to return to business as usual. Historically, much smaller shocks have been able to produce dramatic change, with the 1978 "Winter of Discontent" providing a catalyst for the election of Margaret Thatcher, the ultimate abandonment of the post-war Keynesian consensus, and the ushering-in of neoliberalism. Nor is apparent success a guarantee against change, with Winston Churchill being swept from office by the first majority Labour government in 1945 – at a point which should have marked his greatest triumph. In this book, these apparently inexplicable shifts in the conventional wisdom and the accompanying policy paradigm are explored through the lens of the interest groups that have jostled for position since the second industrial revolution. In this context, inequality, poverty, free market capitalism and the social welfare state have interacted in an uneasy, dynamic dance – the "insecurity cycle". The authors explore these interactions, their impact on the relationship between society and the economy, and the possible implications of Brexit and a re-energised political left. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Labour, Finance and Inequality will be a key resource for academics and students of social and political economics as well as public policy. It will also offer considerable insight to policy makers and a more general non-specialist audience.

Download or read book Labour Markets Institutions and Inequality written by Janine Berg and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labour market institutions, including collective bargaining, the regulation of employment contracts and social protection policies, are instrumental for improving the well-being of workers, their families and society. In many countries, these instituti

Download or read book Inequality and the Labor Market written by Sharon Block and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Jobs with Inequality written by John Peters and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Income inequality has skyrocketed in Canada over the past few decades. The rich have become richer, while the average household income has deteriorated and job quality has plummeted. Common explanations for these trends point to globalization, technology, or other forces largely beyond our control. But, as Jobs with Inequality shows, there is nothing inevitable about inequality. Rather, runaway inequality is the result of politics and policies - what governments have done to aid the rich and boost finance and what they have not done to uphold the interests of workers. Drawing on new tax and income data, John Peters tells the story of how inequality is unfolding in Canada today by examining post-democracy, financialization, and labour market deregulation. Timely and novel, Jobs with Inequality explains how and why business and government have rewritten the rules of the economy to the advantage of the few, and considers why progressive efforts to reverse these trends have so regularly run aground.

Download or read book Unbound written by Heather Boushey and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Book of the Year “The strongest documentation I have seen for the many ways in which inequality is harmful to economic growth.” —Jason Furman “A timely and very useful guide...Boushey assimilates a great deal of recent economic research and argues that it amounts to a paradigm shift.” —New Yorker Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity? Decisions made over the past fifty years have created underlying fragilities in our society that make our economy less effective in good times and less resilient to shocks, such as today’s coronavirus pandemic. Many think tackling inequality would require such heavy-handed interference that it would stifle economic growth. But a careful look at the data suggests nothing could be further from the truth—and that reducing inequality is in fact key to delivering future prosperity. Presenting cutting-edge economics with verve, Heather Boushey shows how rising inequality is a drain on talent, ideas, and innovation, leading to a concentration of capital and a damaging under-investment in schools, infrastructure, and other public goods. We know inequality is fueling social unrest. Boushey shows persuasively that it is also a serious drag on growth. “In this outstanding book, Heather Boushey...shows that, beyond a point, inequality damages the economy by limiting the quantity and quality of human capital and skills, blocking access to opportunity, underfunding public services, facilitating predatory rent-seeking, weakening aggregate demand, and increasing reliance on unsustainable credit.” —Martin Wolf, Financial Times “Think rising levels of inequality are just an inevitable outcome of our market-driven economy? Then you should read Boushey’s well-argued, well-documented explanation of why you’re wrong.” —David Rotman, MIT Technology Review

Download or read book Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.

Download or read book Crisis and Inequality written by Mattias Vermeiren and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spiralling inequality since the 1970s and the global financial crisis of 2008 have been the two most important challenges to democratic capitalism since the Great Depression. To understand the political economy of contemporary Europe and America we must, therefore, put inequality and crisis at the heart of the picture. In this innovative new textbook Mattias Vermeiren does just this, demonstrating that both the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis resulted from a mutually reinforcing but ultimately unsustainable relationship between countries with debt-led and export-led growth models, models fundamentally shaped by soaring income and wealth inequality. He traces the emergence of these two growth models by giving a comprehensive overview, deeply informed by the comparative and international political economy literature, of recent developments in the four key domains that have shaped the dynamics of crisis and inequality: macroeconomic policy, social policy, corporate governance and financial policy. He goes on to assess the prospects for the emergence of a more egalitarian and sustainable form of democratic capitalism. This fresh and insightful overview of contemporary Western capitalism will be essential reading for all students and scholars of international and comparative political economy.

Download or read book Inequality and Labor Market Institutions written by Ms.Florence Jaumotte and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SDN examines the role of labor market institutions in the rise of income inequality in advanced economies, alongside other determinants. The evidence strongly indicates that de-unionization is associated with rising top earners’ income shares and less redistribution, while eroding minimum wages are related to increases in overall income inequality. The results, however, also suggest that a lack of representativeness of unions may be associated with higher inequality. These findings do not necessarily constitute a blanket recommendation for higher unionization and minimum wages, as country-specific circumstances and potential trade-offs with other policy objectives need to be considered. Addressing inequality also requires a multipronged approach, which should include taxation reform and curbing excesses associated with financial deregulation.

Download or read book Economic Woman written by Frances Raday and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author introduces the concept of economic woman and makes her visible in duality with and opposition to the exclusive model of economic man. Economic man has epitomized neo-liberal capitalism, which embraces competition and maximization of profit, resulting in a steep increase in economic inequality. The book demonstrates that women’s inequality is a crucial factor in economic inequality, which cannot be fully understood without relating to women’s situation, and that economic woman cannot thrive in the conditions of economic inequality created under global neo-liberalism. Emphasising the international human rights guarantees of women’s right to equality in all fields of life, the author documents woman’s increased participation in political, public, financial and corporate institutions, employment and entrepreneurship, with some women reaching high profile positions. Nevertheless, using global data, she reveals that economic woman lags behind, with a severe economic power deficit, an unfulfilled promise of equal employment opportunity, a gendered impact of poverty and barriers to gender equality in the family. The book analyses the trap of women’s increased burden of breadwinning in the context of discriminatory laws and practices, infrastructural failures and policy gaps, which preempt achievement of gender equality in economic life. The book is intended for the general reader, academics, students, policy makers and NGOs. It shows economic woman at a global crossroads between a universal paradigm of gender equality and pervasive barriers to equal economic opportunity. The author demonstrates that tackling gender inequality, restoring welfare priorities and reducing economic inequality are inextricably linked. Human rights and governments have a vital role to play in addressing them all, to create a sustainable economic infrastructure for the lives of women and men.

Download or read book Innovation and Inequality written by Gilles Saint-Paul and published by . This book was released on 2008-07-21 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a theoretical analysis of the important mechanisms by which technical progress and innovation affect the distribution of income. This book shows how the structure of demand changes as the economy becomes wealthier, in ways that may potentially harm the poorest segments of the workforce and economy.

Download or read book Macroeconomic Inequality from Reagan to Trump written by Lance Taylor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative approach to measuring inequality providing the first full integration of distributional and macro level data for the US.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality written by Wiemer Salverda and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 759 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive analysis of economic inequality in developed countries. The contributors give their view on the state-of-the-art scientific research in their fields and add their own visions of future research.

Download or read book Labor in the Age of Finance written by Sanford M. Jacoby and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning economic historian Sanford M. Jacoby, a fascinating and important study of the labor movement and shareholder capitalism Since the 1970s, American unions have shrunk dramatically, as has their economic clout. Labor in the Age of Finance traces the search for new sources of power, showing how unions turned financialization to their advantage. Sanford Jacoby catalogs the array of allies and finance-based tactics labor deployed to stanch membership losses in the private sector. By leveraging pension capital, unions restructured corporate governance around issues like executive pay and accountability. In Congress, they drew on their political influence to press for corporate reforms in the wake of business scandals and the financial crisis. The effort restrained imperial CEOs but could not bridge the divide between workers and owners. Wages lagged behind investor returns, feeding the inequality identified by Occupy Wall Street. And labor’s slide continued. A compelling blend of history, economics, and politics, Labor in the Age of Finance explores the paradox of capital bestowing power to labor in the tumultuous era of Enron, Lehman Brothers, and Dodd-Frank.

Download or read book Inequality in Financial Inclusion and Income Inequality written by Goksu Aslan and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We investigate the link between gender inequality in financial inclusion and income inequality, with three contributions to the recent literature. First, using a micro-dataset covering 146,000 individuals in over 140 countries, we construct novel, synthetic indices of the intensity of financial inclusion at the individual and country level. Second, we derive the distribution of individual financial access “scores” across countries to document a “Kuznets”-curve in financial inclusion. Third, cross-country regressions confirm that our measure of inequality in financial access is significantly related to income inequality, above and beyond other factors previously highlighted in the literature.

Download or read book Varieties of Economic Inequality written by Sebastiano Fadda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, the issue of inequality has regained attention in economic and political debates. Although this interest is welcome, the debate is still mostly focused on income or wealth distribution, which is an important aspect but does not present a complete view of inequality. Most of the theoretical and empirical studies produced by economists concern personal income distribution or factor income distribution. This is more evident in the studies of the evolution and characteristics of contemporary capitalism and globalization. Varieties of Economic Inequality considers both theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence of aspects such as income, gender, race, technology, power, region, education and class. Ultimately, this text rejects the idea of supposed long run constant factor shares, the positive effects of inequality and the greater importance of absolute level of income compared to its unequal distribution, and instead reveals the structural inequalities that exist within societies. This book advocates a move away from the focusing on inequality at the level of the individual and suggests policy for eradicating these various forms of inequality. It is suitable for those who study political economy, social inequality as well as economic theory and philosophy.

Download or read book What We Owe Each Other written by Minouche Shafik and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change. Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience—raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old—and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this. A more generous and inclusive society would also share more risks collectively and ask everyone to contribute for as long as they can so that everyone can fulfill their potential. What We Owe Each Other identifies the key elements of a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return. Powerful, hopeful, and thought-provoking, What We Owe Each Other provides practical solutions to current challenges and demonstrates how we can build a better society—together.

Download or read book The Great Demographic Reversal written by Charles Goodhart and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalisation will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. “Whatever the future holds”, the authors argue, “it will be nothing like the past”. Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world’s available labour supply, owing to very favourable demographic trends and the entry of China and Eastern Europe into the world’s trading system. This book demonstrates how these demographic trends are on the point of reversing sharply, coinciding with a retreat from globalisation. The result? Ageing can be expected to raise inflation and interest rates, bringing a slew of problems for an over-indebted world economy, but is also anticipated to increase the share of labour, so that inequality falls. Covering many social and political factors, as well as those that are more purely macroeconomic, the authors address topics including ageing, dementia, inequality, populism, retirement and debt finance, among others. This book will be of interest and understandable to anyone with an interest on where the world’s economy may be going.