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Wages have been spreading out across workers over time – or in other words, the 90th/50th wage ratio has risen over time. A key question is, has the productivity distribution also spread out across worker skill levels over time? Using our calculations of productivity by skill level for the United States, we show that the distributions of both wages and productivity have spread out over time, as the right tail lengthens for both. We add Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries, showing that the wage–productivity correlation exists, such that gains in aggregate productivity, or GDP per person, have resulted in higher wages for workers at the top and bottom of the wage distribution. However, across countries, those workers in the upper-income ranks have seen their wages rise the most over time. The most likely international factor explaining these wage increases is the skill-biased technological change of the digital revolution. The new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that has just begun seems to be having similar skill-biased effects on wages. But this current AI, called “supervised learning,” is relatively similar to past technological change. The AI of the distant future will be “unsupervised learning,” and it could eventually have an effect on the jobs of the most highly skilled.

This study explores whether machinery firms with a ‘hidden champions’ profile leverage Industry 4.0 practices to roll out smart services; whether this allows them to get a firm grip on their installed base; and whether it allows them to expand their international (service) business. The research is conducted based on exploratory, multiple-case study methods.

The author finds that the implementation of smart services can improve a machine tool builder’s hold on its installed base and expand the scope of its international (service) business. However, the study also finds that the ability to capitalise on this potential depends on a series of moderating variables. The study also concludes that there is a risk that smart services do not unlock a strong willingness-to-pay among potential customers.

It, therefore, calls into question several conventional wisdoms, such as the possibilities that Industry 4.0 offers for suppliers operating in business-to-business markets, and the receptiveness to smart services by buyers in such markets. Finally, it highlights the specific liabilities faced by hidden champions with regard to expanding their smart services business.

The chapter provides practical insights into the hurdles that industrial suppliers must overcome in their attempts to achieve uptake of smart services by customers, particularly within a cross-border context.

Purpose: This chapter aims to test the existing argument in favour of technological discrimination of employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic period from the position of labour conflicts between express digitalization and their solutions.

Design/methodology/Approach: The review of the existing sources of research literature shows that their scientific basis for building a clear idea of labour conflicts between express digitalization and their solutions is not sufficient. To fill this gap in the system of scientific knowledge, we use the method of comparative analysis of statistical data. The research objects are the level of technological revolution, level of digitalization, and level of unemployment in the United States and several other countries.

Findings: The results of the research show that digitalization has a large impact on employment and the labour market; in particular, it is a precondition of not only new opportunities for creating new jobs but also increasing the current level of unemployment. Still, it should be noted that the data on the impact of digitalization on the creation of new jobs are rather contradictory.

Originality/Value: It is proved that express digitalization leads not only to the emergence of labour conflicts at the level of companies but also to a large level of unemployment around the world.

The modern concept of labor hoarding emerged in early 1960s, and soon became a standard part of mainstream economists’ explanation of the working of labor markets. The concept represents the convergence of three important elements: an empirical finding that labor productivity was procyclical; a framing of this finding as a “puzzle” or anomaly for the basic neoclassical theory of the firm, and a proposed resolution of the puzzle based on optimizing behavior of the firm in the presence of costs of hiring, firing, and training workers. This paper recounts the history of each of these elements, and how they were woven together into the labor hoarding concept. Each history involves people associated with various research traditions and motivated by an array of questions, many of which were unrelated to the questions that the modern labor hoarding concept was ultimately created to address.

William Baumol famously introduced the “cost disease” according to which the relative price of services vis-á-vis manufactured goods keeps rising because of a negative productivity differential between services and manufacturing industries. Empirical evidence strongly supports the predictions of Baumol’s model of “unbalanced growth” as we show in this article. Baumol was convinced that the cost disease need not have fatal consequences for growing economies as they can afford to earmark ever-higher shares of GDP to pay for services like healthcare and education if the overall “pie” keeps growing. Then, consumption of goods may rise as well even if its share in GDP steadily declines. However, income inequality has surged since the 1980s; and the rising price of vital services means that lower-income strata may be increasingly unable to pay for them. In this article, we develop the nexus between the cost disease and rising income inequality and sketch the ensuing challenges for social policy.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

As Hirschman wrote of himself in an essay of 1984, he was a dissenter. The paper focuses on three dimensions of this dissent. Dissent from orthodoxy, in the first place, even if his stance rarely assumed the feature of a frontal opposition. His distance from mainstream economics clearly emerges in the contrast between growth and development, here exemplified through a comparison of Solow’s and Hirschman’s conceptions. Second, dissent from heterodoxy: from Nurkse, Rosenstein Rodan and the balanced growth theory, but also a distance from the kind of economic theorizing recently exemplified by Krugman’s critical appraisal of Hirschman’s contribution. Third, a dissent from Hirschman himself. He developed a practice defined as “self-subversion” to convey the meaning of a self-critical dialogue with his own positions. In this context, two examples will be discussed, namely his critical reappraisal of the dependency theory, to which Hirschman as a young man contributed indirectly, and his after-thoughts on the choice between sequential or simultaneous strategies. Hirschman’s reflections on the last theme appear relevant to address the problems of current Eurozone crisis: its roots may be traced back to the faulty construction of the Monetary Union, which in turn largely stemmed from the misplaced confidence in the “automatism” of the sequence Monetary Union-Fiscal Union-Political Union.

The paper’s contention is that Hirschman’s “possibilism,” often mentioned, is not the result of a generic psychological propensity to optimism but stems from analytical observations and penetrating critical analysis of received ideas or categories, of other authors or of Hirschman himself.