Search results

Purpose – We study the determinants of growing wage inequality in 16 OECD countries in the past two decades of the twentieth century. The main independent variables that we consider are those pertaining to labor market institutions, to international trade with less developed nations, and to deindustrialization.

Methodology – We specify a statistical model of pay differentials using first differences over five-year periods. The main estimation method used is weighted ordinary least squares. Where necessary, we use instrumental variables and two-stage least squares. We also undertake extensive robustness exercises, including a version of extreme bounds analysis and deleting each individual country from the analysis.

Findings – The determinants of wage inequality are different in the 1980s and in the 1990s. In the 1980s, growing wage dispersion is due to changes in the institutions of the labor market, including declining unionization and declines in the level at which wages are bargained collectively. In the 1990s, increases in pay inequality are due to increasing trade with less developed nations and weakening of social insurance programs.

Originality – This is the first study to report that the causes for pay inequality differed between the 1980s and the 1990s. It is also the first to document statistically that trade with the less developed nations systematically increases pay inequality in the developed world in the 1990s.

I am grateful to the editors of this journal to be given the possibility to comment on Michael Shalev's article. Although I have some minor disagreement with his general argument, I am also grateful to Michael Shalev for taking up what I think is an important question in comparative social science. I find myself in the curious position of being a target of a general critique that I mostly agree upon, namely that too much energy is going into sophisticated methodological techniques at the expense of substantive knowledge about individual cases and theoretical reasoning about causality. However, and probably not surprisingly, I find Shalev's critique of my particular venture into this area far from convincing.

“Tell me surely what will happen tomorrow morning and by nightfall I shall rule the world.” Knowledge of the future is control over it. The aim of corporate planning is to obtain that knowledge and to use it to maximize profit and societal benefit.

The chapters in the volume are organized into two sections. The first three chapters examine the “Experience of Work” in European countries. The following four focus on various aspects of economic “Inequality” by drawing comparisons between and within Europe and other affluent democracies. In this section, I provide a brief preview of each chapter and identify a few of the unique contributions of each.

In recent decades, it has become clear that the major economic, political, and social problems in the world require contemporary development research to examine intersections of race and class in the global economy. Theorists in the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) were the first to develop and advance a powerful research agenda that integrated race–class analyses of capitalist development. However, over time, progressive waves of research streams in development studies have successively stripped these concepts from their analyses. Post-1950s, class analyses of development overlapped with some important features of the BRT, but removed race. Post-1990s, ethnicity-based analyses of development excised both race and class. In this chapter, I discuss what we learn about capitalist development using the integrated race–class analyses of the BRT, and how jettisoning these concepts weakens our understanding of the political economy of development. To remedy our current knowledge gaps, I call for applying insights of the BRT to our analyses of the development trajectories of nations.

Norway is a small nation state on the northernmost coastline of Western Europe, integrated in the Western world economy. For centuries Norway's integration in the world economy had been based on exports of raw materials such as fish and timber, as well as shipping services. In the early 20th century, furnace-based metals (made possible by cheap hydropower) were added to this export basket. Just as the world economy entered an increasingly unstable phase in 1970s, another natural resource was discovered in Norway: petroleum – that is, oil and natural gas from the North Sea. This chapter analyses the challenges and possibilities inherent in the Norwegian strategy of developing an oil economy in a world economic situation influenced by new and stronger forms of international integration through the four decades between 1970 and 2010.

In research on non‐Western populations there is a tendency to limit analysis to only gross demographic differences. This has resulted in the serious misconception of an ethnically homogenous population in countries such as Japan and thus masks a critical dimension of the diversity truly extant. This article examines Western research on Japanese views of people of African descent evident prior to 1945. The argument by Western researchers that Japanese are inherently ethnocentric/racist is examined through primary and secondary sources dealing with Japanese contact with Africans. The alternative explanation offered suggests that while the basic structure of ethnocentrism existed before Western contact, there are indications that this structure was given direction and focus (i.e. became racial) with and through that contact. It is suggested that the view acquired by the Japanese of Africans was based in large part on the collective representations presented to them by Euro‐Americans.