New Perspectives on the Rural Economy

New Perspectives on the Rural Economy
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Small Business. Subcommittee on Rural Economy and Family Farming
Publisher:
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1987
Genre: Agriculture
ISBN:

New Perspectives on Structural Change

New Perspectives on Structural Change
Author: Ludovico Alcorta
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0192590375

New Perspectives on Structural Change is a comprehensive edited volume that outlines both the historical roots and state-of-the-art debates on the role of structural change in the process of economic development, including both orthodox and heterodox perspectives and contributions from prominent scholars in this field. The volume consists of four main sections. The first section covers the theoretical foundations of the structural change literature. The second section presents an empirical overview of the major trends of structural change, using up-to-date data sources and methods. The third section presents a broad ranging empirical analysis of the drivers of structural change. The fourth section examines how processes such as inclusive growth, poverty reduction, productive employment, the global income distribution, and environmental sustainability are affected by structural change, and how they can be influenced by policy.

Behind the Curve: Can Manufacturing Still Provide Inclusive Growth?

Behind the Curve: Can Manufacturing Still Provide Inclusive Growth?
Author: Robert Z. Lawrence
Publisher: Peterson Institute for International Economics
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2024-08-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0881327484

Manufacturing jobs, once the backbone of the modern US economy, have declined as a share of GDP over recent decades, darkening opportunities for middle-class advancement. Similar trends have impacted export superpowers like China, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Driven by nostalgia for a bygone era, however, many countries have turned to reshoring and “industrial policies” to revive manufacturing employment. In Behind the Curve: Can Manufacturing Still Provide Inclusive Growth?, Robert Z. Lawrence argues that these efforts are unlikely to succeed. He demonstrates that deeply rooted forces common to all countries—technological change, shifting consumer spending patterns, and trade—account for lagging manufacturing employment and that these trends are unlikely to be reversed. The industrial sector’s historic role as an engine of opportunity and inclusive growth is unsustainable. Government efforts to promote manufacturing to achieve goals such as industrial self-sufficiency, green transitions, and digital technologies, however well intentioned, may even make economic growth less inclusive. Instead, new policies are needed to help people, places, and countries cope with inevitable changes in the composition of employment.

Combating Inequality

Combating Inequality
Author: Olivier Blanchard
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262362678

Leading economists and policymakers consider what economic tools are most effective in reversing the rise in inequality. Economic inequality is the defining issue of our time. In the United States, the wealth share of the top 1% has risen from 25% in the late 1970s to around 40% today. The percentage of children earning more than their parents has fallen from 90% in the 1940s to around 50% today. In Combating Inequality, leading economists, many of them current or former policymakers, bring good news: we have the tools to reverse the rise in inequality. In their discussions, they consider which of these tools are the most effective at doing so.

The New Geography of Jobs

The New Geography of Jobs
Author: Enrico Moretti
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0547750110

Makes correlations between success and geography, explaining how such rising centers of innovation as San Francisco and Austin are likely to offer influential opportunities and shape the national and global economies in positive or detrimental ways.

Putting Skill to Work

Putting Skill to Work
Author: Nichola Lowe
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2023-05-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262547910

An argument for reimagining skill in a way that can extend economic opportunity to workers at the bottom of the labor market. The United States has a jobs problem—not enough well-paying jobs to go around and not enough clear pathways leading to them. Skill development is critical for addressing this employment crisis, but there are many unresolved questions about who has skill, how it is attained, and whose responsibility it is to build skills over time. In this book, Nichola Lowe tells the stories of pioneering workforce intermediaries—nonprofits, unions, community colleges—that harness this ambiguity around skill to extend economic opportunity to workers at the bottom of the labor market. Skill development confers shared value to both workers and employers because it lies at the intersection of their respective interests. Connecting skill to economic inequality, Lowe calls for solutions that push employers to accept greater responsibility for skill development. She examines real-world examples of workplace intermediaries throughout the United States, exploring in detail the work of manufacturing-focused organizations in Chicago and Milwaukee, and a network of community colleges in North Carolina that coordinates training for biopharmaceutical manufacturers. As workforce intermediaries help employers reinterpret skill, they also convince them to implement inclusive work-based systems that extend family-sustaining wages and better working conditions across the entire workforce. With renewed policy emphasis on skill development, these opportunity-rich solutions can be further expanded—ensuring workers across the entire educational spectrum contribute skills that drive innovation forward and share the gains they generate for the twenty-first century workplace.

Hillbilly Highway

Hillbilly Highway
Author: Max Fraser
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2023-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691250294

The largely untold story of the great migration of white southerners to the industrial Midwest and its profound and enduring political and social consequences Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The "hillbilly highway" was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway, Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture—from the modern industrial labor movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today’s white working-class conservatives. The book draws on a diverse range of sources—from government reports, industry archives, and union records to novels, memoirs, oral histories, and country music—to narrate the distinctive class experience that unfolded across the Transappalachian migration during these critical decades. As the migration became a terrain of both social advancement and marginalization, it knit together white working-class communities across the Upper South and the Midwest—bringing into being a new cultural region that remains a contested battleground in American politics to the present. The compelling story of an important and neglected chapter in American history, Hillbilly Highway upends conventional wisdom about the enduring political and cultural consequences of the great migration of white southerners in the twentieth century.

Who Gets What?

Who Gets What?
Author: Frances McCall Rosenbluth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2021-07-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108881467

The authors of this timely book, Who Gets What?, harness the expertise from across the social sciences to show how skyrocketing inequality and social dislocation are fracturing the stable political identities and alliances of the postwar era across advanced democracies. Drawing on extensive evidence from the United States and Europe, with a focus especially on the United States, the authors examine how economics and politics are closely entwined. Chapters demonstrate how the new divisions that separate people and places–and fragment political parties–hinder a fairer distribution of resources and opportunities. They show how employment, education, sex and gender, and race and ethnicity affect the way people experience and interpret inequality and economic anxieties. Populist politics have addressed these emerging insecurities by deepening social and political divisions, rather than promoting broad and inclusive policies.

Manufacturing Decline

Manufacturing Decline
Author: Jason Hackworth
Publisher:
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231193726

Manufacturing Decline argues that antigovernment conservatives capitalized on--and perpetuated--Rust Belt cities' misfortunes by stoking racial resentment. Jason Hackworth traces how the conservative movement has used the imagery and ideas of urban decline since the 1970s to advance their cause.