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This paper aims to make an attempt to identify labour intensity of organized manufacturing industries in India using the Annual Survey of Industry (ASI) data at three-digit level. It estimates total factor productivity growth (TFPG) and technical efficiency for both labour intensive and all manufacturing industries during the pre- and post-reforms periods.

The study uses three approaches to estimate TFPG. They are growth accounting (GA) (non-parametric), production function with correction for endogeneity – Levinsohn-Petrin (LP) (semi-parametric) and stochastic production frontier (SPF) analysis (parametric). The study uses ASI data published by Central Statistical Organization, Government of India for the period 1980-1981 to 2007-2008 for the analysis.

The study finds that the rate of decline of the labour intensity is more pronounced in the case of labour-intensive industries than all the manufacturing industries. The results of GA method suggest that the TFPG of labour-intensive industries has declined continuously from the pre-reforms period to the post-reforms period. Similarly, LP method indicates a continuous decline in TFPG of labour-intensive manufacturing industries during the post-reforms period. Interestingly, the results of SPF method also corroborate the findings of earlier two methods at the aggregate level but vary at a certain degree at the disaggregated level.

This paper is useful in the context of India considering the importance given to labour-intensive industries by the present government in terms of reviving the sector and improving the productivity and output.

This paper therefore aims at systematically estimating the agricultural trade induced farm employment effects in China.

Using detailed agricultural trade and production data during 1994‐2009, the authors estimate the “labor contents” of agricultural trade flows and use these estimates to compute the farm employment effects.

The authors find that China's agricultural trade has indeed generally developed along its widely believed comparative advantages and disadvantages; however, the farm employment “creation” effect due to labor‐intensive exports has actually been dominated by the employment “substitution” effect due to increased land‐intensive imports, thereby mostly resulting in negative net farm employment in the post‐WTO accession era.

Findings from this first systematic attempt to estimate the trade‐induced farm employment effects do not lend support to the popular notion that increased agricultural trade would help increase farm employment and have important implications for evaluating current and future trade policy in China and elsewhere.

This chapter examines the relationship between the gender gap in labor force participation, intensive growth and economic welfare in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) from 1981 to 2020 under the framework of the classical production function. The generalized method of moment (GMM) technique was employed in analyzing the data. The empirical result showed a negative and significant effect of the gender gap in labor force participation on intensive growth. It was also found that the gender gap in labor force participation had a negative and insignificant effect on economic welfare in SSA. Other findings showed that male labor force participation had a positive and insignificant effect on both intensive growth and economic welfare, while female labor force participation had a negative and significant effect on intensive growth and a negative and insignificant effect on economic welfare. Trade openness had a positive and significant effect on both intensive growth and economic welfare. Based on the findings, narrowing the gender gap in labor force participation has to be given more considerable attention in the SSA region.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the effects of recent demographic transition and rising labor costs on agricultural production structure and pattern in China during 1998-2012.

The authors, first, theoretically discuss the effects of changing relative input prices due to rising labor cost on producers’ decisions regarding input mix (substitution effect), output level, and product quality (output effect). A logarithmic mean Divisia index decomposition method is then applied to empirically identify these effects at aggregated levels, followed by an analysis based on the visualization of land use indicators on changing cropping patterns across Chinese provinces.

The authors find that tightened effective agricultural labor supply and rises in rural labor costs are associated with divergent changes in input mixes and output choices across products. Producers of land-intensive products focusing more on input mix adjustment, while those of labor-intensive products seem to more likely to adjust output choices. Producers’ adaption strategies also varied across Chinese provinces due to natural conditions, leading to shifts and concentrations in the regional distribution of agricultural products, with lower-value bulk products concentrating in the plain areas, whereas higher-value horticulture products increasingly prevailing in sloped areas.

This paper illustrates how adjustments in input mixes and output choice in Chinese agriculture counteracted disadvantages caused by rising labor costs and how such adjustments are product and region specific. Based on these observations, implications regarding further innovations in production technology and institutional arrangements needed within China’s agricultural sector are highlighted in the paper.

Due to its key role in the successful delivery of construction projects, construction productivity is one of the most researched topics in construction domain. While the majority of previous research is focused on the productivity of labor-intensive activities, there is a lack of research on the productivity of equipment-intensive activities. The purpose of this paper is to address this research gap by developing a comprehensive list of factors influencing the productivity of equipment-intensive activities and determining the most influential factors through interview surveys.

A list of 201 factors influencing the productivity of equipment-intensive activities was developed through the review of 287 articles, selected from the ten top-ranked construction journals, by searching for construction productivity in the articles’ titles, abstracts or keywords. Next, the most influential factors were determined by conducting interview surveys with 35 construction experts. To ensure that the interviewees were aware of the research objectives and the distinction between labor- and equipment-intensive activities, an information session was held prior to conducting the surveys, and the surveys were conducted in interview format to allow for clarification and discussion throughout the process.

Project management respondents identified foreman-, safety- and crew-related factors as the categories with the most influence on productivity; tradespeople respondents identified foreman-, equipment- and crew-related factors as the most influential categories. In total, 14 factors were identified, for which there was a significant difference between the perspectives of project management and tradespeople regarding the factors’ influence on productivity.

This paper provides a comprehensive list of factors influencing the productivity of equipment-intensive activities. It identifies the most influential factors through an interview survey of 35 construction experts, who are familiar with the challenges of equipment-intensive activities based on their experience with such activities in the industrial construction sector of Alberta, Canada. Additionally, the differences between the factors that influence the productivity of labor- and equipment-intensive activities are discussed by comparing the findings of this paper with previous research focused on labor intensive activities.

Several studies have shown that the mechanism of labour-intensive construction (LIC) projects can mitigate high unemployment and create skilled development, especially in developing nations. The guidelines and practices for implementation may have faced some encumbrances in some countries. Whether the current guidelines and practices for municipal infrastructure support agent (MISA) to execute LIC projects face hindrances in South Africa has yet to receive in-depth studies. Thus, this study attempts to proffer policy solutions to improve the proposed revised guidelines and practices for MISA in LIC project execution in South Africa.

The study's objectives were accomplished via a combination of 16 virtual interviews of built environment professionals and government officials involved in LIC project execution in South Africa and supported by the analysed documents. A thematic approach was used to analyse the data and presented two main themes.

Findings show lax enforcement of discretionary funds, lax institutional capacity and inadequate individual skills, among others, as the gaps in existing South Africa's LIC guidelines and practices. Also, policy solutions to address the gaps were proffered.

The suggested feasible policies will improve the proposed revised guidelines and practices for MISA in LIC project execution in South Africa. This guide will promote the development of individual skills, institutional capacities and increase employment across South Africa.

This study promotes the use of LIC to create employment and contribute to proffering measures that will improve the proposed revised third edition of the guidelines and practices for MISA to execute LIC.

Chronic unemployment is a flaw in modern capitalism that calls for reform. Unlike expansionary demand‐management programmes, public works will be non‐inflationary if they put back into the economy in government spending no more than the dollar value taken from the economy in taxes. The spending should be labour intensive while all associated taxing should target sectors and products that are capital intensive. This economic approach is not expansionary/ inflationary but structural: the reforms would shift production in a labour‐using as opposed to a labour‐saving direction, so that it would take more hours of work to produce the same GNP. The pool of workers who are under‐employed and unemployed would supply the required extra hours. First, examines the problems associated with fiscal and monetary approaches to unemployment. Then details the proposed reforms, looks at technical aspects, diagrams and macro‐economic implications, and considers the probable effects on the US balance of trade. The final section considers the critics′ view that an automation tax would be a neo‐Luddite attack on technological progress.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between quality management practice and labor productivity in labor-intensive manufacturing companies in a developing nation and benchmark with the world average.

Primary and secondary data were collected from 34 selected companies. The primary data were obtained using a questionnaire survey to determine the quality management adoption level of each company using the European Business Excellence Model. Secondary data also collected in order to compute labor productivity of each organization and benchmark with international norms.

In this research, labor productivity is measured by revenues per employee and total assets per employee and found that adopting quality management has strong relationships with revenue per employee unlike total asset per employee that is weakly related.

Several authors suggest a positive relationship between adoption quality management principles and productivity in large organizations located in developed countries. However, this paper particularly focuses on labor productivity of labor-intensive companies.

It is often the case that policy makers are slow to adopt the results of economic analysis in their policy formulation. Shiftworking is one of those rare cases where policymakers have seized upon something as having particular significance which economists have on the whole neglected. Robin Marris published a seminal work, The Economics of Capital Utilisation, in 1964, but it was not until the later 1970s that further substantial work was undertaken by economists and shiftworking appears to be regarded as hardly worth a mention in the standard labour economics texts. This relative neglect by economists is surprising given the significance and growth of shiftworking in a number of countries. Where data are available it is estimated for instance that, as a rough approximation, the number of workers engaged on shiftwork doubled between 1950 and the mid‐1970s. For the UK one estimate is that between 1954 and 1964 the proportion of manual employees working shifts in manufacturing industry increased from 12 to 20 per cent, and that by 1978 the figure was 34 per cent (that is approximately 1.5 out of 4.27 million employees). Shiftworking has in fact reflected a conflict of goals for the policymakers. On the one hand in both the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the European Commission (EC) concern has been expressed at the possible harmful effects on workers of particular shiftworking patterns and proposals have been made to limit its incidence and control its form (this being particularly the case with nightwork and with the hours of women and young persons). On the other hand, concern with the growing problem of unemployment has led policymakers in other sections of these same bodies to propose an extension of shiftworking, as one particular form of work‐sharing, in order to generate jobs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of shiftworking for male manual workers in British manufacturing industry in order to cast some light on these issues. In particular supply equations are estimated in order to understand what factors lead workers to select this particular form of work and demand equations to determine the nature of the employer's demand for labour. These structural equations form the basis of a simultaneous system in which plant size (measured in terms of employment) is estimated as a function of shiftworking and a vector of other explanatory variables in order to determine whether in fact it is reasonable to conclude that an extension of shiftworking will generate additional jobs in Britain. Before presenting the regression results it is however necessary to examine in more detail these socio‐economic policy aspects of shiftwork, to clarify the theoretical framework and to discuss some of the problems of estimation which stem largely from data deficiencies, but also involve problems of simultaneity notably in the relationships between shiftworking, capital intensity and plant size.

There has been a period of slow but a steady increase in wage inequality in the Indian manufacturing sector since the mid‐1980s, which has gone hand‐in‐hand with an increase in the relative employment of skilled workers across all industries in the same period. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the co‐movement of relative employment and wages of skilled workers can be attributed to the changes in trade policy that has occurred in the Indian economy since the mid‐1980s.

The two dominant theoretical perspectives on why trade reforms lay lead to wage inequality are Heckscher–Ohlin theory and trade‐induced skill‐biased technological change (SBTC). The paper evaluates the applicability of these theoretical perspectives to the Indian case using disaggregated industry data from Annual Survey of Industries from 1973 to 1997.

Evidence was found of the validity of both the two dominant theoretical perspectives on wage inequality to explain the co‐movement in wage inequality and relative skill intensity in Indian manufacturing, with both variables increasing in the 1990s. Trade‐induced technological progress has led to an increase in relative skill intensity and wage inequality within industries. At the same time, the decline in protection that seems to have occurred more in unskilled labour‐intensive industries has led to a relative fall in the economy‐wide return to unskilled labour relative to skilled labour. Therefore, trade reforms have led to a widening of wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers, and an increase in relative skill intensity in Indian manufacturing.

The paper contributes to support of the trade‐induced SBTC hypothesis which may provide a consistent explanation of why many countries in the south experienced increases in wage inequality with the onset of trade liberalisation.