Academic literature on the topic '150507 Micro labour market issues'

This paper provides an historical perspective on topics related to recent developments in the Australian industrial relations system discussed in this issue of the Journal— the 'living wage' concept and the safety net, 'fairness' in relative wages, women's wages, the Accord, labour market decentralisation and the role of trade unions. It concludes that recent legislation was not necessary to facilitate increased productivity because the prevailing system had shown sufficient responsiveness to the needs of the economy, both macro and micro. By limiting the jurisdiction of the AIRC and reducing the power of the weaker unions, recent legislation bas created a dual system with a less equitable pay structure and an institutional arrangement less able to deal with wage inflation under more buoyant economic conditions.

This paper deals with the margins of entrepreneurship at which small business owners are working almost on their own with no or very few employees, and where some work for low returns and run firms that lack stability and/or prosperous dynamics. However, even the area of ‘entrepreneurship at the margins’ is a wide field, embracing not only the broad margins of entrepreneurship but also the fluid borders between entrepreneurship and the informal sector on the one side and the labour market system on the other. New firms – even those that are ultimately very successful – may be more or less created in an experimental market and product testing phase, in which business founders are still employed or registered as unemployed before becoming self-employed. In such cases, the practical starting-point of an entrepreneurial existence is part of a fluent continuum of different activities closely connected to the entrepreneur's sphere of dependent work as an employee or job-seeking during a period of unemployment. The paper addresses this area of entrepreneurship within an integrated framework, which combines entrepreneurship analysis with labour market research and studies on social stratification and social mobility. It contributes to the debate on entrepreneurship at the margins by combining selected empirical information on the case of Germany with conceptual ideas of a labour market perspective. The integrated approach highlights some key issues and raises further questions about the field of entrepreneurship.

The extant research on policy transfer insufficiently addresses two issues. First, transfer to less-advanced countries. Second, micro-institutional pressures on subsidiaries, particularly the role of local partners in joint ventures (JVs). This study investigates the transfer of labour market orientations by American multinational enterprises to their Turkish subsidiaries by focusing on the influences of macro- and micro-institutional factors when the ‘transferor’ is an advanced and ‘transferee’ is a less-advanced economy, ‘dominance effects’, and the role of local JV partners. Case study findings provide evidence for ‘smooth’ transfer of the policy. This uncommon finding is discussed as a result of ‘ideal combination’ of ‘encouraging pressures’ at the macro- and micro-institutional levels, including role of local JV partners and the nature of the policy transferred.

One may wonder why political scientists would bother about the analysis of questions relating to rates of unemployment. In effect, should not this be part of economic science? Economists are generally seen as better equipped with theories on the micro and macro level to deal with issues regarding labour market performance, the development of employment and the explanation of volatile rates of unemployment and inflation. This view is held by the majority of the economic science guild and by many policy-makers.

The multiple analysis of rate of dependency between innovative processes and structural labour market changes in the form of evolution in sector of employment was exposed in the article. It has been proved that the impact of innovations on the labour market can be considered, on the one hand, as a part of multi-factor socio-economic macro-, meso-, micro-level systems, which makes a direct or indirect impact on state of other elements of system and which is under its influence at this time; on the other hand, as an open, dynamic, flexible system, functioning of which leads to socio-economic resources development. The definition of labour market has been suggested as a system of socio-economic relations between workers, employers and society (organizations and institutes) for realization of ability to work, supporting social guarantees, approximation of parties’ interests of labour relations, state`s interests, legal control of terms of employment etc. The analysis of structural changes, which take place in the labour market of different levels administrative territorial state`s structure by means of innovations, covers the period 2012-2017. The impact of innovations on employment is associated with `creative destruction` where innovations, on the one hand, ruin current workplaces and, on the other hand, create new ones. Analysis has demonstrated that employment increasing and related structural improvements are determined by kind of incorporated innovations. Organizational innovations have more impact on size and structure of employment, than technological ones. The practical importance of the research involves developing of methodological and practical aspects of choosing multiple approach in relation to innovation analysis as a determinant of structural labour market changes. The originality of the research is reflected in the comprehensive creative analysis of innovations from the point of view of activation of the youth labour market in Ukraine. The key factors of the low level of involvement of young citizens in the country's economy and society are identified. The authors have suggested the prospects for the development of the youth labour market, the elimination of youth unemployment, which are conditioned by the peculiarities of the social condition and employment behaviour of young people. The need to study the experience of European countries is emphasized, where training in the working professions is well organized and the youth unemployment rate is the lowest in Europe. Distinctiveness. Conducted researches let to confirm attained results in relation to choosing implements for coping with current troubles and disproportions in society. Implementation of multiply approach of analysis and diagnostics of correlation of innovations and employment will make a direct impact on supporting living standards and progressive socio-economic state`s development. The monitoring of solidarity of actions of public communities, government agencies, enterprise structures will ensure attainment of active increasing of innovation technologies, high living standards level, that will offer some new opportunities for business environment in relation to labour productiveness maintaining method and equivalent income level from enterprise activity, will solve the unemployment and labour migration issues, create some new flexible forms of employment, increase the level of state`s competitiveness in global economy facilities. Key Words: creative analysing, diagnostics, employment of population, innovations, multiple approach

This paper critically examines emergent research with sentiment analysis tools to assess their current status and relevance to applied opinion and behaviour measurement. The rapid spread of online news and online chatter in blogs, micro-blogs and social media sites has created a potentially rich source of public opinion. Waves of public feeling are vented spontaneously on a wide range of issues on a minute-by-minute basis in the online world. These online discourses are continually being refreshed, and businesses and advertisers, governments and policy makers have woken up to the fact that this universe of self-perpetuating human sentiment could represent a valuable resource to guide political and business decisions. The massive size of this repository of emotional content renders manual analysis of it feasible only for tiny portions of its totality, and even then can be labour intensive. Computer scientists have however produced software tools that can apply linguistic rules to provide electronic readings of meanings and emotions. These tools are now being utilised by applied social science and market researchers to yield sentiment profiles from online discourses created within specific platforms that purport to represent reliable substitutes for more traditional, offline measures of public opinion. This paper considers what these tools have demonstrated so far and where caution in their application is still called for.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of specific active labour market policies (ALMP) and increased use of zero hour contracts (ZHCs) in creating an environment in which low-wage jobs flourish. Alongside these, it examines the role of financialization over the last 30 years in fostering the nuturalization of policies that institutionalize low wages and deregulate the economy in favour of big business. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws upon academic literature, official statistics, and analyses via the concept of neoliberalism. Findings This paper demonstrates that via a set of interconnected macro and micro factors low pay is set to remain entrenched in the UK. It has demonstrated that this is not the result of some natural response to labour market demands. Far from it, it has argued that these policy choices are neoliberal in motivation and the outcome of establishing low pay and insecure employment is a significant character of the contemporary labour market is deliberate. Research limitations/implications This paper encourages a re-think of how the authors address this issue of low pay in the UK by highlighting alternative forms of understanding the causes of low pay. Practical implications It presents an alternative analysis of low pay in the UK which allows us to understand and call into question the low-pay economy. In doing so it demonstrates that crucial to this understanding is state regulation. Social implications This paper allows for a more nuanced understanding of the economic conditions of the inequality caused by low pay, and provides an argument as to alternative ways in which this can be addressed. Originality/value The paper examines the relationship between the rise of neoliberalism and finance capital, the subsequent emergence of the neoliberal organization, the associated proliferation of ALMP and ZHCs, and the impact of these on creating a low-wage economy. It makes the argument that the UK’s low-wage economy is the result of regulatory choices influenced by a political preference for financialization, even if such choices are presented as not being so. Thus, the contribution of this paper is that it brings together distinct and important contemporary issues for scholars of employee relations, but connects them to the role of the state and neoliberal regulation.

This Special Issue, devoted to micro-credentials and qualifications for future work and learning in a disrupted world, is a welcome and critically timed contribution to educational theorising and practice internationally. COVID-19 has accelerated Industry 4.0’s pervasive labour market disruption. Digitisation’s efficiencies have been rapidly embraced and broadly up-scaled as a matter of necessity. Many industries and professions have fast tracked digitalisation to transform pre-pandemic business models for current and future sustainability. We have seen all education sectors – Kindergarten to Year 12 (K-12), vocational education and training/ further education (VET/FE) and higher education (HE) – digitise and digitalise to varying degrees in their rapid move to emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020). Robust evaluation will be needed to assess the efficacy of that pedagogical triaging – our well-intentioned ‘panic-gogy’ (Kamenetz, 2020) – to inform the quality and fitness-for-future-purpose of that online pivot. In the meantime, HE’s students and graduates emerge from 2020 wanting to support and apply their studies in a challenging job market that was already weakening pre-pandemic and has now worsened (for example in the Australian context, Social Research Centre, 2020), especially for young people. If that was not enough, significant and underlying issues of climate change, reconciliation with First Nations, demographic change and globalisation continue to have implications for equal and equitable participation in the full range of life opportunities, including in meaningful paid work. In brief, the context for this Special Issue is an international grand challenge writ very large.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: “Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général”, published in 1730, became the basis for formulating economic theories of Hume, Smith and the physiocrats, as well as for the works of Knight and Mises. The aim of the article is to present the economic issues touch on in the essay against the background of the review of the relevant literature in the field of economic theory, as well as the possibility of transforming economic models into practical structures shaping the economic views of future generations. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: Theoretical issues were confronted with economic knowledge among sample N=600 in 2016-2020. The chi-square (χ2) test was used to test the existence of statistical significance between gender and the understanding of the importance of economic issues. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The sample has shown lack of basic knowledge in the economic filed in the aspect of university economic courses. At the same time, only those surveyed who are active on the labour market as entrepreneurs, perceive the need to raise qualifications and make complete knowledge in the examined subject. RESEARCH RESULTS: Cantillon in his essay focuses on the "economic aspects of human action”. The results of studies conducted at the university have shown, that their basic knowledge in the field of economic sciences is at an unsatisfactory level. CONCLUSION, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMENDATIONS: Contemporary economics omits the entrepreneur in economic models and in the relevant literature. However, it is a key link, directly affecting both, micro and macroeconomic indicators. The connections and mutual influences described by Cantillon are favourable to thoroughly understanding of economic phenomena in real, economies world. This knowledge should be disseminated not only for better economic estimation, but also for a better understanding of events occurring in the world and the results of their implications.

About one-third of trade in food and agriculture takes place within global value chains (GVC). Coffee, palm oil or biofuels production are examples of the modern organization of agri-food production through GVC (de Becker, Miroudot, 2014; Greenville et al., 2016; Baliè et al., 2019). Agricultural raw materials nowadays may cross borders many times before reaching the final consumers, as they are embedded in intermediate and processed goods which are produced in different countries. Agri-food GVC are typically characterized by a strong coordination between farmers, food processors or traders, and between processors and retailers. Value chain coordination can be initiated by downstream buyers, such as supermarkets and food processors, or by upstream suppliers including farmers or farmer cooperatives (Swinnen and Maertens, 2007; Reardon et al 2007). In a number of cases, a group of “lead firms” plays a critical role by defining the terms of supply chain membership and whom the value is added (Scoppola, 2021). The growth of the agri-food GVC raises new issues for the agricultural and food sectors. Participating to the GVC is expected to have several positive effects, both for countries and farmers, in terms of technology and knowledge spillovers, increased productivity, growth, employment opportunities, and ultimately increase of farmers’ income. On the other hand, market concentration in agri-food GVC raises concerns related to the emergence of market power (Swinnen, Vandeplas, 2014). Further, there are concerns that producing for agri-food GVC may result in the intensification of agricultural production, with negative environmental effects in terms of deployment of natural resources and water stress. Sound knowledge and evidence about the nature and implications of modern agri-food GVC are relevant for policymaker, firms and civil society. The economic analysis of agri-food GVC challenges agricultural and food economists in several respects. The complex nature of GVC and of the issues they raise makes it essential the use of new and multiple lens of analysis (World Bank, 2020). Country-level (macro) approaches to GVC are needed to investigate the drivers of the world-wide fragmentation of agri-food production and the welfare implications of countries participating to GVC. Recent progresses in the empirical trade analysis of GVC are certainly fundamental to the understanding of agri-food GVC. Industry level (meso) approaches are needed to investigate the relationship among the various stages of the GVC. Analytical tools and approaches from the industrial organization literature are to be used to investigate issues such the price transmission along the agri-food GVC, the drivers of vertical coordination or the distributions of benefits along the GVC. A firm level approach (micro) is needed to investigate the implications of the participation to GVC for farmers. The 10th AIEAA Annual Conference contributes to this debate, by putting together different disciplines and approaches to the analysis of agri-food GVC and of their implications in terms of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Three keynotes explore these issues from different perspectives. The keynotes by Silvia Nenci Ilaria Fusacchia, Anna Giunta, Pierluigi Montalbano and Carlo Pietrobelli entitled Mapping global value chain participation and positioning in agriculture and food (Nenci et al., 2022) reviews key methods and data issues arising in country-level analyses of GVC. They overall conclude that improvements in GVC measurements and mapping are currently still severely limited by data availability. Empirical literature to date mostly uses global Input-Output matrices and aggregate trade data to map and measure GVCs; however, sectoral and country coverage remains rather weak. They further review recent evidence about trends of GVC, by using the GVC participation indicator and the upstreamness positioning indicator (measuring the distance of the sector from final demand in terms of the number of production stages) for two sectors, that is “Agriculture” and “Food and Beverages”. They show that at the country level, GVC participation is globally around 30-35 percent for both agriculture and food and beverages; while GVC linkages in agriculture are mostly forward linked, food and beverages are much more in the middle and at the end of a value chain. Furthermore, they show that, unsurprisingly, agriculture has a higher score on upstreamness with respect to the food and beverages sector. They conclude by discussing some critical issues faced by agriculture and food GVC concerning trade policies, technological innovation and the COVID crises. The keynote by Tim Lloyd entitled “Price transmission and imperfect competition in the food industry” aims at providing insights on how information is conveyed by means of prices between food consumers and agricultural producers along the agri-food value chains. After presenting some basic insights from theory, the keynote addresses the issue of how to detect the degree of market power by reviewing theory-consistent empirical models as well as the approaches developed in the New Empirical Industrial Organisation literature. The increased use of highly detailed retail (‘scanner’) data reveals that the food industry (retailing, manufacturing, and processing) is a major source of the price changes and that it also mediates price signals originating in other parts of the food chain in increasingly nuanced ways; the author concludes that agricultural and food economists should be wary of inferring too much about the competitive setting based on prices alone. The keynote by Miet Maertens entitled “A review of global and local food value chains in Africa: Supply chain linkages and sustainability” highlights the expansion of agri-food GVC in low- and middle-income countries and how GVC are modernizing rapidly through institutional, technical, and commercial innovations. While a large body of literature focusses on the development implications of participation in GVC, the development of local food supply chains in low- and middle-income countries has received less attention. The review assesses potential linkages between global and local value chains in African countries, and the sustainability outcomes of supply chain innovations. The keynotes emphasizes that market competition as well competition for land, labour, water, and other resources may create negative linkages between the development of global and local food value chains. Spill-over effects, such as investment, technical or institutional spillovers, may create positive linkages and complementarities in the process of supply chain development. The existence of such linkages importantly depends on the type of crop and the structure and organisation of supply chains and entail important consequences towards socio-economic and environmental sustainability.

This book provides an integrative framework for the anthropological demography of health, a field of interdisciplinary population research grounded in ethnography and in critical examination of the social, political, and economic histories that have shaped relations between peoples. The field has grown from the 1990s, extending to a remarkable range of key human and policy issues, including: genetic disorders; nutrition; mental health; infant, child and maternal morbidity; malaria; HIV/AIDS; disability and chronic diseases; new reproductive technologies; and population ageing. Collaboration with social, medical, and demographic historians enables these issues to be situated in the evolution of institutional structures and inequalities that shape health and care access. Understanding fertility levels and trends has widened beyond parity and contraception to the many life course risks and alternative healing systems that shape reproductive health. By going beyond conventional demographic and epidemiological methods, and idealised macro/micro-level units, the anthropological demography of health places people’s health-seeking behaviour in a compositional demography based on ethnographic observation of group formation and change over time, and of variance between what people say and do. It tracks family and community networks; class, linguistic, and religious groups; sectoral labour and market distributions; health and healing specialisms; and relations between these bodies and with groups controlling local and national governments. The approach enables examination of how local cultures and experience are translated formally into measures on which survey and clinical programmes rely, thus testing the empirical adequacy of such translations, and leading to revision of concepts of risk and governance.

There has been a retreat from the “conventional” work organization to new forms of contemporary organizations. Parallel to this shift in organizational forms, the composition of the workforce also changed. Greater numbers of women entered the labour market and began occupying managerial positions. Despite the increase of women in the workforce, progress towards equality lagged behind. The intention of this chapter is to provide an overall picture of the representation of women in organizations and to acquaint the readers with some of the major issues that play role in women's career advancement. The chapter begins by introducing macro and micro level barriers that hinder representation of women in the contemporary workplace. Some of these major barriers, such as stereotypes attached to women, occupational segregation, the gender pay gap, and discrimination are then detailed and theoretical and practical implications are provided. The chapter also covers studies on the leadership of women in organizations and outlines the need to unravel the potential of women.

There has been a retreat from the “conventional” work organization to new forms of contemporary organizations. Parallel to this shift in organizational forms, the composition of the workforce also changed. Greater numbers of women entered the labour market and began occupying managerial positions. Despite the increase of women in the workforce, progress towards equality lagged behind. The intention of this chapter is to provide an overall picture of the representation of women in organizations and to acquaint the readers with some of the major issues that play role in women's career advancement. The chapter begins by introducing macro and micro level barriers that hinder representation of women in the contemporary workplace. Some of these major barriers, such as stereotypes attached to women, occupational segregation, the gender pay gap, and discrimination are then detailed and theoretical and practical implications are provided. The chapter also covers studies on the leadership of women in organizations and outlines the need to unravel the potential of women.

Purpose – to study the possibilities of institutional theory to establish a modern theory of economic growth, including the factors of institutions and technologies changes. These factors are a set of rules with high coercive force to the agents’ action form a particular mode/model of their adaptation, together with other institutions. Research Methodology – the neoclassical models of economic growth, which may include institutional factors and to study their impact on the growth and change of the factors, into the business practice are applied. The key scientific problem is to choose the right market Institute for a proper way of technological development. The authors use the micro-level analysis of the agents and institutions’ interaction in the process of new technologies appearance. Morphological and taxonomic analysis in order to highlight the models of technological development and economic growth had been applied. Findings – the research results may enrich an economic theory and practice in the area of business models applicability. The findings may assist a business community to influence the general technological development within the national institutional systems. Research limitations – due to the fact that different institutions, structures and technologies act on the economic dynamics at the same time, separating their influence is an independent scientific problem that is not solved in all cases. However, the set of considered institutional factors forms and provides a kind of “manufacturability” of economic growth. Practical implications – the so-called institutional macroeconomics as a practical discipline (which has a very close connection with behavioural macroeconomics) may assist to explore the economic growth from the point of view of changing institutions (firms, business community), labour markets and information – technical and technological changes. Originality/Value – the value of the research consists in the systematization of institutional factors affecting the economic growth, conducting a morphological structural analysis of growth types, which allow identifying eight main growth trajectories in business activity.