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Prior studies have confirmed market segmentation as an important shackle to China's macroeconomy upgrade, but the systematic analysis of microenterprise upgrade remains inadequate. This paper aims to investigate the nonlinear impact of market segmentation on microenterprise upgrade.

The price method was applied to calculate China's provincial market segmentation, including commodity, capital, labor and energy. The generalized method of moments was employed to examine the nonlinear impact of market segmentation on the upgrading of manufacturing enterprises based on microenterprise data from 2003 to 2019.

First, China’s heterogeneous market segmentations have been significantly reduced. Macroeconomics and policies are critical factors in market integration. Second, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between China’s total market segmentation and the upgrading of manufacturing enterprises. Third, the relationship between the commodity market segmentation, labor market segmentation, energy market segmentation and manufacturing enterprises' upgrade is shown as an inverted U-shaped. Nevertheless, the relationship between the capital market segmentation and upgrading of manufacturing enterprises exhibits a U-shape.

The impact of market segmentation on the upgrading of manufacturing enterprises in China performs nonlinearly. An inverted U-shaped relationship exists between market segmentation in commodity, labor and energy and the upgrading of manufacturing enterprises, while a U-shaped relationship prevails between capital market segmentation and the upgrading of manufacturing enterprises.

The purpose of this paper is to characterise the position of highly educated African migrants in the Finnish labour market and to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on that position.

The paper is based on the biographical work stories of 17 highly educated African migrant workers in four occupation areas in Finland: healthcare, cleaning, restaurant and transport. The sample was partly purposively and partly theoretically determined. The authors used content driven thematic analysis technique, combined with by the biographical narrative concept of turning points.

Using the case of highly educated African migrants in the Finnish labour market, the authors show how student migration policies reinforce a pattern of division of labour and occupations that allocate migrant workers to typical low skilled low status occupations in the secondary sector regardless of level of education, qualification and work experience. They also show how the unique labour and skill demands of the COVID-19 pandemic incidentally made these typical migrant occupations essential, resulting in increased employment and work security for this group of migrant workers.

This research and the authors’ findings are limited in scope owing to sample size and methodology. To improve applicability of findings, future studies could expand the scope of enquiry using e.g. quantitative surveys and include other stakeholders in the study group.

The paper adds to the knowledge on how migration policies contribute to labour market dualisation and occupational segmentation in Finland, illustrated by the case of highly educated African migrant workers.

In the Northern Ireland context, even though the debate about whether Catholics have experienced discrimination has raged for over two decades, there has been little attempt to relate the wide‐ranging and sophisticated USA debate to circumstances within the province. Takes the first steps to redress this shortcoming by outlining the key themes in the USA debate about unequal labour market treatment.

In the last 30 years or so we have seen a proliferation of research projects on immigrants and non‐white minorities in the labour market (labour market segmentation) and as entrepreneurs (ethnic entrepreneurialism). Each of these literatures helps us understand the nature of immigrant and minority participation in the labour market, but each only offers a partial view. In this paper, I bring these topics together in an empirical investigation of the relationship between ethnic labour market segmentation and ethnic entrepreneurialism in Canada, using 1996 census data. I show that there is a close correspondence between the niches where immigrants and minorities find work, and those where they become entrepreneurs. Immigrants who are drawn to niches that offer few opportunities for self‐employment have low rates of entrepreneurship and, conversely, those who are over‐represented in niches with considerable scope for self‐employment are inclined to establish their own businesses. This shows that the propensity for self‐employment is, to an important degree, determined in the regular labour market. Therefore, entrepreneurship should not be seen as an intrinsically cultural phenomenon (i.e. that certain groups are “naturally” entrepreneurial), but instead as arising out of the opportunity structure associated with wage and salary labour.

This chapter presents an investigation into the theory of labour market segmentation and income inequality in the Ghanaian mining sector. Mining activity especially gold mining has been a significant component of exports as well as employment and income earning in the three major mining regions of Ghana. While income growth is an economic benefit, the high incomes associated with the mining sector may lead to greater income inequality. This chapter provides an analysis of mining activity and income inequality in the Western, Eastern, and Ashanti regions of Ghana. The application of labour market segmentation and the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) for personal income are found to be significantly associated with the type and levels of mining employment. However, this observation is not linear as income inequality initially increases with mining activity before decreasing at medium to high levels of mining employment, thus following a Kuznets curve pattern. Segregating datasets for indigenous and expatriate staff reveals very different patterns of income inequality. It poignantly increases with indigenous and/or local community personnel relative to expatriate technical personnel at high levels of mining employment; income inequality is lower among the local community residents relative to nationals from other regions and/or from neighbouring countries. This means segmented labour markets (SLM) within the mining industry are likely to be a problem as they result in increased income inequality among locales relative to foreign expatriates.

This paper analyses the effects of both training and overeducation on upward mobility in the internal labour market, the professional market and the “supplementary labour market”. The latter segment can be considered as a broadly defined secondary labour market as it is not restricted to the low‐level unskilled jobs only. This broader definition – also found in initial segmentation theory – allows for the changed character of the secondary labour market in the industrialized countries. As expected, “career training” influences upward mobility positively. However, contrary to the predictions of segmentation theory, particularly in the supplementary labour market career training is a means of gaining promotion to a higher level job. Overeducation also affects upward mobility positively, which indicates that overeducation is to some extent a temporary phenomenon at the individual level. However, this also holds in particular in the supplementary segment of the labour market. The estimation results show that the supplementary labour market is less of a dead end than the segmentation theory predicts and is a more valuable place to get training than has been recognized. The supplementary market probably plays an important role in the transition process between initial education and the labour market. Although workers may be initially overeducated in their first jobs, a supplementary segment job could be an attractive step towards reaching a more suitable position in the labour market.

The purpose of this paper is to take occupation opportunity as an indicator to examine the impact of hukou on labor market segmentation in China. It estimates the scale of the impact and identifies the way of the impact. Especially, the paper takes hukou uniform reform as an example and tests whether hukou reforms helped in eliminating labor market segmentation.

The data sets this paper adopted are the 2000 Census and 2005 Mini Census data in China. Linear model and Probit model are used in estimating hukou's impact. Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition is used in decomposing the difference in occupation distribution among hukou statuses. DID evaluation method is used in comparing the region with hukou uniform reform and the region without to capture the influence of the reform.

The result shows that occupation segmentation based on hukou significantly exists in urban labor market. Hukou uniform reform improved the occupation opportunity of local rural workers but migrating rural workers were somehow crowded out. Migrating urban workers did not benefit from the reform. To conclude these, the reform released employment segmentation between rural and urban workers within the reformed region but strengthened the segmentation between the local residents and outcomers which could influence future labor source and scale in reformed area.

The paper evaluates the hukou uniform reform's impact on the labor market using an empirical way for the first time and makes concrete policy recommendations based on these findings.

The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamic change of the migrant labor market in China from 2002 to 2007 using two comparable data sets.

To understand the factors behind the wage change, the authors use the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (Oaxaca, 1973; Blinder, 1973) method to study the hourly wage change over this five-year period.

The focus is on the rural-urban migration decision, the wage structure of migrants, the labor market segmentation between migrants and urban natives, and the changes of these aspects from 2002 to 2007. The paper finds that prior migration experience is a key factor for the migration decision of rural household members, and its importance keeps increasing from 2002 to 2007. The results show that there is a significant increase in wages among both migrants and urban natives over this five-year period, but migrants have enjoyed faster wage growth, and most of the increase of wages among migrants can be attributed to the increase of returns to their characteristics. The authors also find evidence suggesting convergence of urban labor markets for migrants and for urban natives during this five-year period.

In order to make the 2002 and 2007 data sets comparable, the authors had to restrict the observations with fixed residence only, and can only include seven cities. These limit the representativeness of the sample. When interpret the findings in this paper, it is important to keep this in mind.

Due to the scarcity of data, there are few studies on the dynamics of the migrating population and the migrant labor market. Since the urban natives and migrants are still segmented in the labor market, the migrant labor market may have its own characteristics, and also, because of the increasing importance of the migrants in Chinese society, knowledge of the evolution of the migrant labor market is crucial for grasping the whole story behind the Chinese economic miracle.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of changes in the relative composition and in the segmentation between formal and informal labour on earnings differentials among women over the last decade in Brazil.

The authors follow Machado and Mata’s method to decompose the changes along the earnings distribution, with correction for sample selection and using microdata from the Demographic Census of 2000 and 2010. Informal labour was divided into informal salaried labour and self-employment, and both groups were compared with the formal labour separately.

The results indicate that, in both cases, an increase in earnings differentials in the bottom of the earnings distribution due to segmentation, suggesting that the returns to formal labour have grown relatively to informal labour during the period. On the other hand, earnings differentials decrease as one moves up the earnings distribution due to the composition effect, which is stronger on the top of the distribution relatively to the bottom. Furthermore, there are compensating differentials for self-employed women above the 30th quantile, which contributed to reduce the inequality between this group and formal workers.

The paper contributes to a better understanding of the changes taking place in female labour, shedding some light on how they affect different points along the earnings distribution. Furthermore, the adopted approach proposes a new application for the correction of sample bias in the context of quantile regression by employing a logit multinomial, and using the Demographic Census data.

This article addresses the claim, particularly popular in the 2000s and implicitly resting on a segmentation view of the labour market, that a flexible labour market-driven immigration policy (within the EU as well as from outside), often associated to a ‘Canadian model’, would respond to the economic needs of continental European countries.

A comparative historical approach is applied, including analysis of historical series of unemployment and migration data and a qualitative analysis of secondary sources on Germany, Spain and Canada, selected as best representatives of different labour market and immigration regimes. The research asks to what extent, and how, immigration has been used as a ‘buffer’ for labour market uncertainty.

Against ideas of a ‘Canadian’ model advertised in Europe (e.g. Germany), the historical and quantitative analysis shows that Canada itself has moved from short-term labour market-driven immigration policies to more long-term approaches. In fact, there has been a stronger labour market-migration link in Spain, but not without problems,

The article is a small-N comparison of critical cases, that is most different labour market models. Major demographic and geographic differences exist between the three countries, which raises even more scepticism about the suitability of a Canadian model in Europe.

The policy implications are centred on the detected paradox of labour market-driven immigration policies: in order to be sustainable, they need to have a long-term orientation and involve some degree of social integration policies.

The article adds to comparative studies of migration policies through a stronger link to labour market analysis and in particular issues of uncertainty and segmentation.