The introductory chapter, written by Werner Eichhorst and Paul Marx, opens with a generally accepted proposition that European labour markets are undergoing a process of deep transformation characterised by deindustrialization and the growth of non-standard work. This premise is further supported and elaborated through specific insights which establish the general framework for this book. For i...

The paper examines the contentious issue of the extent of surplus labour that remains in China. China was an extreme example of a surplus labour economy, but the rapid economic growth during the period of economic reform requires a reassessment of whether the second stage of the Lewis model has been reached or is imminent. The literature is inconclusive. On the one hand, there are reports of mi...

In Spain the absolute number of employed persons has increased from about 12,300,000 persons in 1994 to 19,300,000 at the end of 2005. In the same period, the number of immigrants has increased from about 500,000 to more than 4 million. The aim of this paper is to analyse the implications of these changes for social inequality. In particular, we investigate whether a new type of unskilled servi...

Using a two-bloc endogenous growth model calibrated to two generic sending and receiving countries of equal size, we assess the growth and welfare impact of world migration flows of different skill compositions. The sending country (East) has a lower total factor productivity and a lower endowment of skilled labour. Migration can induce two growth-enhancing effects: an efficiency effect from th...

This paper addresses the particular question of the impact of this “new” digital environment on the labour market. It will investigate in particular how ICT has changed and is changing the labour market and the “old”, classical insights into the relationship between technology, employment and skills. We start in Section 2 with a review of the literature on technology and employment. In p reviou...

The paper presents the results from a CGE model of interactions between public and private health care, outputs of non-health goods and national welfare in a small open economy applied to the UK. The effects on welfare of higher provision come through direct gains, affecting the well-being of households, and indirectly, through increases in the effective (i.e. ‘able to work’) endowments of skil...

We relate the technological and factor price determinants of inward and outward FDI to its potential productivity and labour market effects on both host and home economies. This allows us to distinguish clearly between technology sourcing and technology exploiting FDI, and to identify FDI which is linked to labour cost differentials. We then empirically examine the effects of different types of...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first produce a labour market profile of nonIrish immigrants who arrived in Ireland in the ten years to 2003. We then go on to use the labour market profile in estimating the impact of immigration (non-Irish) on the Irish labour market. Immigrants are shown to be a highly educated group. However, they are not all employed in occupations that fully reflec...