Labour Control and Developmental State Theory: A New Perspective on Import‐substitution Industrialization in Latin America

Drawing on historical research into the period of import‐substitution industrialization (ISI) in Chile and Argentina between the 1930s and 1960s, this article claims that developmental state theory (DST) obfuscates a crucial feature of state intervention in Latin America. Specifically, despite a long‐standing interest in state–society relations, DST has been unable to incorporate adequately into its analytical framework labour–state relations and labour control in the workplace. This is because DST, in its various guises, privileges state–society relations mediated by institutions from which labour is implicitly or explicitly excluded. Extending the analytical lens of DST, the article combines critical labour‐relations and labour‐process theories to identify the purposive establishment of ‘regimes of labour control’ via changes in institutional and workplace relations. Using this expanded framework, it shows how the often vacillating strategies pursued by the state under ISI in Chile and Argentina, and the inefficient outcomes of ISI in these countries, can be better understood by considering efforts designed to exert control over labour.     

Dimensions and dynamics of residential segregation by income in urban Canada, 1991–1996

This paper examines the trends in residential segregation by income (post-transfer, pretax income) in the thirty-nine largest Canadian urban areas between 1991 and 1996. The study is motivated by the relative lack of attention paid to residential segregation by income in the Canadian context and by conceptual arguments linking compromised life chances and increased social tensions for the populations of highly segregated cities. We investigated several dimensions of segregation using five different measures (we focus on three of these here given the correlation structure of the measures) to examine changes in segregation between 1991 and 1996, a period characterised by economic recession, cutbacks in social programs and a widening of inequality in market incomes at the national scale. Overall, income segregation increased in most urban areas across all dimensions of segregation during the time period, with particularly high degrees of segregation observed in prairie cities (Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Regina). Of the three largest metropolitan areas (Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal), Montréal was the most consistently segregated. We also find that increases in spatial separation and spatial concentration by income occurred despite the fact that at the national scale, the tax and transfer system appeared to be adequately redressing a rise in inequality in labour and market incomes (as demonstrated by the lack of change in post-transfer national income inequality measures during a period when inequality in market and labour incomes rose sharply). This implies that the lived experience of changes in income distribution are unlikely fully captured by aspatial, national-scale measures and that intra-urban measures with a spatial dimension are an important indicators of inequality in Canadian society.     

Income inequality across Canadian provinces in an era of globalization: explaining recent trends

In this article, I use panel data methods to investigate possible factors influencing recent trends in income inequality across Canadian provinces. The ratio of the income share of the highest-to-lowest quintiles and the Gini coefficient of total income are used as measures of inequality. Both point to rising levels of inequality from 1981 to 1999, especially during the 1990s, and the estimation results suggest that several factors have had significant effects on such an increase. In particular, an increase in international trade, technological change, educational heterogeneity, and the unemployment rate are found to contribute to greater inequality. Deindustrialization and declining government transfer payments to persons are also factors explaining the rise in inequality. In contrast, an increase in the female labour force participation rate appears to have dampened inequality. There is also some evidence of a negative association between de-unionization and inequality while no significant association is found between inequality and other demographic shifts, such as immigration and the share of the population over the age of 65.     

Transnational Corporations,Industrial Policy and the ‘War of Incentives’: The Case of the Argentine Automobile Industry

In the context of intensified internationalization of production, automobile firms in Argentina face a profoundly different structure of incentives to the prior decades of import substitution industrialization. Recent policies in the Argentine auto industry have been aimed at a recovery through a reorientation towards exports. Two initiatives set the context for changes during the 1990s: an industry–government–labour agreement and the implementation of a commercial partnership with Brazil. The dramatic recovery of the sector is an apparent validation of the policies implemented. This article questions this recovery by drawing on case‐study work at a number of auto plants and components suppliers. The effects of these policies on changes in the structure of production and industry and on externalities supporting domestic firms are examined. Lessons are drawn for the role of government policy in supporting the contribution of transnational corporations to domestic technological and organizational development.     

Engendering New Labour's Workfarist Regime: Exploring the intersection of welfare state restructuring and labour market policies in the UK

This article deconstructs New Labour's emerging workfarist regime to reveal the complex and contradictory gender relations embodied in and through its work–welfare policy. Starting from the decline of manufacturing employment within the UK, it traces the deregulation of the labour market and the range of structural and social changes initiated by this process. Noting, in particular, how the ‘feminisation of the economy’ is connected to the changing characteristics of employment and women's socio-economic positions, the article identifies the manner in which the growing labour market participation of women is serving to (further) entrench gender inequality. Against this background, it proceeds to raise issues regarding the increased expectation to enter the labour market observed within programmes such as the New Deal for the Unemployed, which stipulates that the receipt of state benefits ought now to require a labour input. The crux of analysis is on the policy and political discourses that award priority to paid work in the formal labour market, whilst simultaneously neglecting the gendered divisions of labour around unwaged care work and domestic tasks. In suggesting that gender remains a key form of political-economic organisation in the contemporary period of after-Fordism, this article argues that (further) attention must be given to the ways in which its socially constructed properties are manifest within work–welfare policy and the ramifications of this embedding for social and economic equality.     

Heterogeneity and Labour Agency in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This article considers the broad question of how to improve the conditions of workers in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), which relies on predominantly informal activities. While acknowledging that formalization can provide ASGM miners with tenure security and protection of labour rights, it is important to highlight that not all workers are likely to benefit from formalization in the same way, and that decent work ambitions should extend to all workers, regardless of whether or not they are formalized. It is therefore crucial to understand the heterogeneity in the ASGM workforce. This article describes working conditions for different categories of workers based on a survey carried out in the Watsa and Shabunda territories in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. It analyses labour agency and shows that workers are diversely integrated in the labour process and may use power resources in various ways. The discussion reflects on ways to consider the heterogeneity in ASGM labour and to push the ASGM agenda beyond formalization.     

Rising Inequality in an Era of Austerity: The Case of the US

US inequality has rapidly increased since the early 1970s. For advanced economies, inequality is linked to stronger incentives that enhance growth, education, innovation and entrepreneurship. However, the rise in US inequality is concentrated in the top 1%. Hence it is increasingly possible that economic rewards may be too uncertain to promote effort, suggesting the US has crossed a tipping point in which inequality reduces growth. Other costs include more social and political instability, making inequality the next potential “crisis” facing America. This study first examines trends in inequality and then reviews arguments that suggest that it is both good and bad for growth in America's cities. We then provide evidence that there has been a reversal in the effects of inequality after 2000 with it now being associated with less income and job growth in US metropolitan areas. We conclude by arguing that no general solution is possible without significant political reforms that equalize political influence.     

The Measurement of Socio‐economic Gender Inequality Revisited

The measurement of socio‐economic gender inequality has not received much attention from the development literature despite its great relevance and important policy implications. In this article we present two new indices to measure gender inequalities that overcome some of the limitations inherent in the UNDP gender‐related indices and other indices presented in the literature. The proposed new indices are conducive to exploring the extent to which gender gaps favour women and/or men, and to showing the contribution of the different subcomponents to the overall levels of gender inequality. Using UNDP data, our calculations suggest that the levels of gender inequality are mostly explained by differences in the earned‐income subcomponent and that the average difference between women's and men's achievement levels has been reduced by 12 per cent during the period 1995–2005.     

Income Inequality and Voter Fractionalisation: An Empirical Study of 16 Multi-Party European Democracies

This article empirically investigates relationships between voter fractionalisation and economic inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient of income inequality and a new index of fractionalisation developed for this study. Our main findings are as follows. States with high income inequality have less voter fractionalisation. States with higher GDP per capita have more voter fractionalisation. States with high election thresholds for parliamentary representation have less voter fractionalisation. Eastern European states and states with high unemployment rates have more voter fractionalisation. States with greater ethnic fractionalisation have less voter fractionalisation. Fractionalisation has been greater in recent decades (2000s and 1990s) than earlier decades (1980s).     

Migration and regional inequality: changing characteristics of China’s economic inequality

Scholars studying economic inequality in China have maintained that regional inequality and economic divergence across provinces have steadily increased over the past 30 years. New studies have shown that this trend is a statistical aberration; calculations show that instead of quickly and sharply rising, regional inequality has actually decreased, and most recently, remained stable. Our study suggests that China’s unique migratory regime is crucial to understanding these findings. We conduct a counterfactual simulation to demonstrate how migration and remittances have mitigated income inequality across provinces in order to show that without these processes, we would have seen more of a rise in interprovincial income inequality. We conclude by arguing that inequality in China is still increasing, but it is changing and becoming less place-based. As regional inequality decreases, there are signs that point to the increasing importance of interpersonal inequality.     

The Evolution of India's Industrial Labour Share and its Correlates

There has been substantial recent interest in the decline of labour shares across many countries. For the most part, attention has been focused on developed countries. This article examines the evolution of India's labour share in its formal industrial sector from 1983 to 2016. Using two datasets corresponding to sectoral aggregate data and plant-level data respectively, the authors document a secular decline in the labour share across all sectors from 1983, with a stabilization at very low levels (around 8 to 10 per cent) starting around 2007. The plant-level data are used to identify correlates that illuminate reasons for the overall decline in the labour share. The authors find strong evidence to support multiple causes, including increased capital intensity, greater informalization, greater privatization, and productivity increases in larger firms; they therefore suggest that the declines in labour share experienced are due to a composite set of factors. Conversely, other potential explanations (such as regional variation in the labour share) have less explanatory power.     

Income Transfers Alone Won't Eradicate Poverty

Even in the current economic situation, in developed countries, rhetoric about cutting "poverty" is misleadingly outmoded—because it implicitly suggests that government income transfers can be the vehicle for achieving substantial reductions in poverty. Almost all Americans already live far above subsistence poverty: most because of their earnings, and the rest because of government transfer programs. This decline in material poverty is obscured by weaknesses in how the official U.S. poverty measure counts income. What is now called poverty is really "income inequality." Reducing income inequality is also a vitally important social goal, but it cannot be accomplished through income transfers alone. The authors argue that, although income transfers have a role to play in lessening the impact of material deprivation, real progress in raising incomes will require building the human capital of the economically disadvantaged. This means both increasing the earnings capacity of lower-income workers and reducing the number of female-headed families.     

Income Inequality and Wealth Concentration in the Recent Crisis

This article shows that the increase of income inequality and global wealth concentration was an important driver for the financial and Eurozone crisis. The high levels of income inequality resulted in balance of payment imbalances and growing debt levels. Rising wealth concentration contributed to the crisis because the increasing asset demand from the rich played a key role in the growth of the structured credit market and enabled poor and middle‐income households to accumulate increasing amounts of debt. This analysis thereby puts both income and wealth inequality at the epicentre of the recent crisis, and as crucial for social scientists analysing the causes of the crisis. The authors’ findings suggest that the policy response to the crisis should not be limited to financial regulation but must involve policies to address inequality by increasing the bargaining power of labour as well as redistributive tax policies.     

The Costs of Exclusion: Gender Job Segregation,Structural Change and the Labour Share of Income

While women's share of employment has risen in many countries over the last two decades, gender job segregation has worsened, with women increasingly excluded from ‘good’ jobs in the industrial sector. In this article, the determinants of gender job segregation are assessed using panel data for a broad set of developing countries covering the period 1991–2015. The effect of gender job segregation on all workers, via the labour share of income, is also analysed. The results identify two major contributors to gender job segregation — the rising capital/labour ratio and the ratio of female/male labour force participation rates — indicative of ‘crowding’ and exclusion as economies move up the industrial ladder. The analysis further indicates that the crowding of women into lower quality jobs has a negative effect on workers as a whole by dampening the labour share of income. Those processes are influenced by global and macroeconomic conditions and policies that have circumscribed the expansion of high‐quality jobs relative to labour supply, intensifying competition for ‘good’ jobs and weakening labour's bargaining power.     

TRENDS IN NEIGHBORHOOD INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE U.S.: 1980–2000*

ABSTRACT This paper reports evidence on the geographic pattern of income inequality, both within and between neighborhoods, across a sample of 359 U.S. metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000. The results indicate that overall income inequality within a metro area tends to be driven by variation within neighborhoods, not between them, although we find that between‐neighborhood differences rose dramatically during the 1980s and subsided somewhat during the 1990s. While this trend is similar to what existing research has found, our findings reveal potentially important differences in the magnitudes of the changes depending on whether neighborhoods are defined by block groups or tracts.     

Social class and wealth inequality in Italy over 20 years, 1993–2014

Italy is facing its worst economic crisis since the Second World War. As many studies have already shown, the crisis is affecting the country’s social class structure, thus accentuating several inequality tendencies. In this connection, the empirical purposes of this article are twofold: (1) to analyze whether accumulation and inequality in wealth are growing or declining in absolute terms; and (2) to investigate the relationship between social class and wealth inequality. To this end, we adopt a longitudinal approach – that is, we take the 1993–2014 period into account – by using data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Our findings suggest that overall net worth has trended down in the years following the beginning of the crisis, and that inequality in wealth has basically been increasing during the 20-year period, with a decline from 2012. However, there has been no persistent social splitting process in wealth distribution by social class. Rather, there is a high (and increasing) level of domestic differentiation in terms of household wealth by class, mainly within the lower class and self-employed middle class, which could put further stress on social cohesion standards and allow new forms of social vulnerability to emerge.     

The Piketty phenomenon: why has Capital become a publishing sensation?

Why has Piketty's Capital become a publishing sensation? Not for revolutionary findings; its message that western societies have experienced increases in inequality of income and wealth over the long term is hardly new. Of the several reasons discussed in this article, attention is paid in particular to the book's timing and its claim to reveal the laws of income and wealth distribution in western societies. Had the book been published before 2008 it would have been much less successful. Piketty's revelation of the big trends and their underlying logic helps to objectify, legitimize and offer a kind of catharsis for surging middle‐class anxieties during the Great Recession. These anxieties have been further intensified by evidence that over 90 per cent of the increase in disposable income in the United States has accrued to the top 1 per cent of the population in the past several years, and a not much lower percentage to the top 1 per cent in Britain. In the conclusion it is argued that if Piketty's forecasts are even remotely accurate, capitalism will lose its core claim to legitimacy.     

The “Blind” State: Government Quest for Formalization and Conflict with Small‐Scale Miners in the Peruvian Amazon

The Peruvian government is attempting to implement a formalization plan to deal with the chaotic expansion of small‐scale mining activities in the Amazon. However, this plan has been contested, delayed and halted by local miners. Why exactly has it been so hard for the government to enforce a formalization plan in Madre de Dios? This article aims to answer this question by analysing both government efforts to establish control over the region and the challenges it faces in enforcing its formalization plan. It is argued that current resistance to and conflict over the formalization process in Madre de Dios reveals a state governance problem due to the region having been historically governed as a zone for exploitation rather than for social and economic development. Similarly, the analysis highlights the absence of major corporations through which the state can establish a basis for governance, as in other parts of the country.     

Transitions to Work: Masculine identities,youth inequality and labour market change

In this article, the initial transitions of white working-class male post-compulsory school leavers in two British cities are investigated. In the context of economic restructuring, the decline of manufacturing employment, and the rise in young women's educational achievements, it has been argued that poorly educated young men are increasingly disadvantaged in the labour market. Indeed, this may be the first generation of young men in the post-war period that will experience downward mobility compared to their fathers. In an earlier article, the author explored the labour market aspirations of white working-class boys living on peripheral local authority estates in Cambridge and Sheffield and in their final year at school. Despite the decline of manufacturing employment, they hoped to enter typically 'male' jobs in, for example, the car industry in both cities and in the steel industry in Sheffield. In this article, the author explores their labour market experiences in the year since they left school and their sense of themselves as masculine workers in the context of debates emphasising a growing 'crisis' of masculinity.     

The Geography of Economic Development and Racial Discrimination in Brazil

This study investigates the relationship between unequal resource and population distribution and racial wage inequality in Brazil. Using sample data from the 1980 Brazilian census, monthly wages were estimated for white and Afro-Brazilian men working in nine metropolitan areas. Estimates showed that racial disparities in wages existed across all regional labour markets. Regression-based decomposition analysis found that a substantial portion of the racial wage gap was due to discrimination (unequal pay), while estimates of the magnitude of labour market discrimination indicated considerable variation by geographical area. Discrimination was higher in the predominantly white and highly developed areas of the South than in the former slave and underdeveloped regions of the Northeast.