This study applies a methodology used by De Henau and Himmelweit (2013) to study resource allocation in Australian mixed-sex couple households. Using 18 waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey and by means of fixed effects estimations, the study identifies how men’s and women’s contributions via paid and unpaid work influences their satisfaction with the financial situation (SWFS) within households. Employment status is used to proxy each partner’s contribution to household resources. The results reveal that paid contributions through full-time employment have a strong role in determining SWFS. This is a source of gender difference because Australian men are much more likely to be engaged in full-time employment than women. Most often, for both men and women, unpaid contributions to household resources (proxied by less than full-time employment) has a detrimental effect on their own SWFS, but smaller effects on their partner’s SWFS. These results imply that gender asymmetry in paid and unpaid contributions to household resources contributes to the reproduction of gender inequalities within Australian households. The results add external validity to the relevance of De Henau and Himmelweit’s (2013) analysis of these issues.

The COVID-19 pandemic is sending shockwaves through communities and economies, and public servants have risen to the novel policy challenges in uncharted waters. This crisis comes on top of considerable turmoil for public services in recent decades, with public management reforms followed by the global financial crisis (GFC) leading to considerable change to public sector employment relations and a deprivileging of public servants. The research adopts the lens of the ‘public service bargain’ to examine the effects of the pandemic across Australian public services. How did Australian public service jurisdictions approach public employment in 2020, across senior and other cohorts of employees? How did this pandemic response compare to each jurisdictions’ response to the GFC a decade earlier? The research also reflects more broadly of the impact on public sector employment relations and to what extent pandemic responses have altered concepts of the diminished public service bargain or the notion of governments as model employers?

This article examines trends in social disadvantage in Australia over the decade to 2018 using two approaches: a monetary approach using poverty and a living standards approach using deprivation. We compare the two approaches, highlight their implications and assess whether the evidence produced by each is consistent with trickle-down effects. The estimates allow for variations in thresholds, the treatment of housing costs and relative and absolute measures. The findings indicate an overall decline in poverty that is dependent on the treatment of housing costs and a more consistent decline in deprivation but with little or no improvement for many experiencing poverty or deprivation. Poverty and deprivation among unemployed households were above those for people in other labour force states throughout the period and while these differentials have narrowed, the findings suggest that trickle-down effects did not reach many of those highly disadvantaged or are subject to long delays.

The introduction of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) heralded a methodological innovation for the study of Indian labour, allowing the researcher to build panels tracking urban individuals over a year. Using two rounds of the PLFS covering the periods 2017–18 and 2018–19, we construct a pooled panel of urban Indian individuals aged 15–65 and focus on women’s experiences in the labour force. We find evidence of low dynamism in the Indian economy, with women facing significant difficulties regarding labour force participation. While a majority of women remain outside the labour force throughout the year, those who do participate face significant disadvantages. Job-finding rates for women are half that of men, indicating weak demand for women’s labour in the economy. Women face significant exits from both employment and unemployment, with nearly 18% of employed women leaving their jobs and moving to non-participation over the year. Women’s relative disadvantages persist even when age and education are considered, with the lowest job-finding rates seen for young and graduate women, and rates of labour force exit much higher than that of men. This paper highlights the importance of looking at demand side questions when it comes to examining women’s labour force participation.

South Korea has been faced with a widening economic gender gap during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. To inform discussion of Korean women’s future following the pandemic, this article explores the country’s history of women’s empowerment. It identifies cultural, educational, economic, and political changes, and their long-term effects on women’s role and status. The analysis is based on data collected from Korea’s national statistical database and a review of relevant literature. Findings inform policy directions for advancing women’s economic empowerment in Korea and other countries following a similar development path and contribute to expanding our understanding of the factors and relations influencing women’s empowerment.

South Africa has one of the world’s highest youth unemployment rates despite a high demand for skilled labour, because employability remains severely hampered by a persistent vertical skills mismatch. The flagship upskilling programme deployed by the government to enhance job readiness and enterprise development capabilities among rural youth has, however, shown mixed results. The slow uptakes of alumni calls into question the adequacy of the programme’s skills composition in resolving the labour market mismatch. Using the Outcome Mapping approach and probit estimation on self-reported skills improvements among programme participants, this study finds perceived improvements in non-technical skills to be associated with a higher likelihood of success in comparison to technical skills, both in securing a stable job and in launching a viable enterprise after completion of the programme. These findings confirm the growing importance of ‘soft skills’ in bolstering employability when jobs are scarce. They suggest the need for a stronger emphasis on this set of skills in upskilling programmes aimed to address unemployment challenges.

Major reforms in education, globally, have focused on increased accountability and devolution of responsibility to the local school level to improve the efficiency and quality of education. While emerging research is considering implications of these changed governance arrangements at both a school and system level, little attention has been afforded to teacher union responses to devolutionary reform, despite teaching being a highly union-organised profession and the endurance of decentralising-style reforms in education for over 40 years. Drawing upon a power resources approach, this article examines union responses in cases of devolutionary reform in a populous Australian state. Through analysing evolving policy discourse, from anti-bureaucratic, managerialising rhetoric to a ‘post-bureaucratic, empowerment’ agenda, this article contributes to understandings of union power for resisting decentralising, neoliberal policy agendas by exposing the limits of public sector unions mobilising traditional power resources and arguing for strengthening of discursive and symbolic power.

Although workplace death is known to have profound social and psychological effects on families, the economic consequences have not been explored. This pioneering study investigated families’ financial situations following fatal workplace injuries. An online survey explored the impact of post-death financial change on 142 participants from Australia, Canada, the USA, and the UK using a scale from the economic strain model. Half of the participants experienced financial loss, and the proportion struggling financially increased from 24% to 62% after the death. Workers’ compensation claims were made by 74% of participants, but they reported problems with delays, levels of entitlement, and satisfaction with the scheme. Other key sources of assistance were family and friends or support groups and services. Participants who were older, next-of-kin, and partner/spouses were significantly more likely to experience financial loss as were those whose deceased relative worked 51+ hours per week, possibly because the deceased was self-employed or worked significant overtime not covered by compensation settlements. Those experiencing financial loss sought short- and long-term financial help, accessed social security, re-entered the workforce, acquired mental disorders, and experienced declines in physical health, at significantly higher rates than participants without financial loss, and their children developed mental health problems significantly more often. Findings highlight the detrimental, and potentially intergenerational, effects of financial loss on the health and wellbeing of families bereaved by traumatic workplace deaths. Policy issues flowing from the results are discussed, including how this informs wider debates on refashioning regulatory protection.

The aim of the article is to analyse the functions that dividends perform in contractual relationships between public companies’ executives and shareholders. The author analyses the income function of dividend, but also considers its sociological aspects. Talcott Parsons' social system theory is the main point of reference, especially, the concept of contract institution. The article justifies the thesis on the relevance of dividends in shaping the equilibrium of power, information policy and the composition of shareholders in a joint-stock company. Dividend policy has a great regulatory potential, which is important in the face of various crises occurring in contemporary capitalism.

This study analyses firms’ labour demand when employers have at least some monopsony power. It is argued that without taking into account (quasi-)monopsonistic structures of the labour market, wrong predictions are made about the effects of minimum wages. Using switching fractional panel probit regressions with German establishment data, I find that slightly more than 80% of establishments exercise some degree of monopsony power in their demand for low-skilled workers. The outcome suggests that a 1% increase in payments for low-skilled workers would, in these firms, increase employment for this group by 1.12%, while firms without monopsony power reduce the number of low-skilled, by about 1.63% for the same increase in remuneration. The study can probably also be used to explain the limited employment effects of the introduction of a statutory minimum wage in Germany and thus leads to a better understanding of the labour market for low-skilled workers.

Understanding the distributional impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the labour market and ultimately on the living standards of the population is key to designing adequate policy responses to shield individuals’ and families’ livelihoods. This article illustrates the impact of COVID-19 on the labour market as well as on living standards in the case of a small open economy: Mauritius. We present descriptive evidence based on a unique set of telephone household surveys, representative of the Mauritian population, conducted between May 2020 and March 2021. We find that women had a higher risk of losing their job and leaving the labour force, reversing a decade-long trend of increasing labour force participation. Low-skill workers in sectors that depend on global demand – and even more so if employed informally – together with women were more likely to be affected by the crisis. One in three households reported a loss in income since the start of the pandemic, and the probability of experiencing this shock increases with the number of household members who lost their job and who were employed informally. From a policy perspective, our findings underscore the negative distributional consequences of the pandemic and provide substantive evidence for the viability of a further proactive policy stance to shield the livelihoods of vulnerable households during the economic recovery phase.

Sri Lanka has a history of successfully managing communicable diseases by utilising its extensive public healthcare network of community clinics and public hospitals. This article makes use of Job Demands-Resources theory (JD-R) to examine the impact of COVID-19 on nurses’ working conditions in public and private hospitals in Sri Lanka. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses’ job demands on public hospital wards included long working hours, limited workplace autonomy, minimal medical resources and high workloads caused by understaffing. Private hospital nurses experienced pressure from patients and their families to provide them with discounts on medical bills. Nurses allocated to work on COVID-19 wards experienced additional physical job demands from wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) for lengthy periods on hospital wards in a humid climate. Nurses on COVID-19 wards also experienced increased anxiety that they could transmit the disease to family members. While nurses experienced job resources such as social support from nursing supervisors and other nurses, they reported receiving minimal training in the provision of healthcare to COVID-19 patients. This combination of high job demands and low job resources increased the levels of exhaustion and mental distress experienced by many nurses working on COVID-19 hospital wards.

This paper builds an estimation model to test whether improved labour standards necessarily lead firms to send work offshore to countries with lower wages and fewer employment protections; or improved labour standards influence the labour market, where with time, firms attract more skilled workers, which help deter outward foreign direct investment (FDI). When more firms comply with improved labour standards, the industrial relations climate also improves as non-compliance usually causes labour unrest. Using a model built on pooled cross-sectional time-series data from 2008–17, we studied the role of changes in labour unrest and the percentage of skilled workers in the labour force in predicting outward FDI in Taiwan. Per our estimation model, we found the percentage of skilled workers steadily increased as Taiwan maintained improved labour standards. The increase in skilled workers also increased labour costs making it challenging for firms to stay onshore. However, skilled workers helped firms improve productivity, which justified increased labour costs. As a result, firms in Taiwan that complied with labour standards found it less challenging to pay higher wages and stayed onshore.

The absence of institutionalised childcare and education during the lockdowns, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, put parents who worked from home in a stressful situation in which they had to combine the roles of teacher, parent and employee. This study aims to analyse how the closure of kindergartens and schools during the March–May 2020 lockdown in Slovenia changed the reported allocation of time, and perceived emotional exhaustion of parents working from home, compared to nonparents. We also focus on the differences in the impacts of lockdown between genders, status of family-provision and employment sectors of parents. Using data from a survey carried out on cohabiting and married individuals in Slovenia and applying a difference-in-difference estimator, we find that parents incurred a significant increase in their unpaid work burden, reductions in time devoted to paid work and leisure and suffered an increase in emotional exhaustion. Namely, Slovenian parents reported roughly 2 h less of paid and 4 h more of unpaid work per day during the lockdown in comparison to nonparents. The analysis also demonstrates that females performed more unpaid work and enjoyed less leisure before the lockdown, but the lockdown adjustment did not further increase gender inequality.

A growing number of Chinese firms motivate their employees through employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). Using a sample of listed firms in China, this paper examines the impact of ESOPs on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP), as well as the mechanisms of ESOPs. The empirical results show that ESOPs have a positive impact on firm TFP. The mechanism tests convey that ESOPs increase firm TFP by promoting research and development (R&D) investment and mitigating agency costs. These results are robust after accounting for endogeneity and using alternative metrics of TFP. In addition, we find that the positive effect of ESOPs on firm TFP is more pronounced in non-state-owned firms and firms with a less severe free-riding problem. Furthermore, the effect on firm TFP is positively associated with the subscription proportion of non-executive employees in ESOPs. Overall, the results of this study underscore the important role of employee ownership in firms’ productivity improvement.

India’s phenomenal service-led growth in recent decades has generated debate on the role of services vis-à-vis manufacturing as the engine of growth. With the rapidly increasing importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in global production systems since the 1990s, there have been claims of services having developed a growth dynamism similar to manufacturing. This article examines the role of services in India’s growth process using the concept of inter-sectoral linkages to make comparison with the role of manufacturing. Input-Output linkages and time series analysis reveal that services have been much less integrated in India’s production structure than manufacturing. They were also less important in generating indirect employment spillovers through sectoral linkages, compared with manufacturing. Service sector growth is found to be autonomously driven by final demand and therefore less dependent on its interconnections with the rest of the economy from the production side. The findings also indicate that service sector growth has stimulated manufacturing growth but not vice versa. However, the impact of services on manufacturing from the demand-side is neither sustainable nor desirable going forward. India is in urgent need of strategically developing its manufacturing sector through integrating dynamic services like ICT and internalising productivity gains. At the same time measures to address India’s inequality are critical to broaden the country’s demand base and make the growth process more sustainable and inclusive. In this sense, inequality reduction is a prerequisite for growth and should not be seen as an alternative to it.

For several years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, Australia registered a public surplus, and this was generally interpreted as the result of responsible fiscal policy. However, since the outbreak of that crisis, no such fiscal balance has again been attained, giving rise to a range of explanations from the political incapacity of governments to the weak economic behaviour characterising the post-crisis era. Noteworthy in any case is that analysts have failed to cite the importance of a factor that was key to reaching pre-crisis surpluses: the vertiginous growth of private debt. This work argues that it was precisely the intense granting of bank loans and consequent increased demand from the private sector that boosted economic activity and led to the generation of public income sufficient to feed the fiscal surpluses of that period. Indeed, according to the proposals of Wynne Godley, this would have been the only way to register a public surplus in a context of current account deficits, typical of the Australian economy. This paper considers whether Australian private debt played a significant role in achieving fiscal surplus by way of a review of the Australian real estate boom and public accounts from the 1990s onward, also estimating an econometric model of autoregressive vectors to explore the link between these two variables. The results obtained appear to corroborate the hypothesis: severe private borrowing contributed to Australia’s fiscal surpluses. This finding has significant implications for budgetary policy.

In investigating recent changes to the automotive industry production process, such as modularisation, our work emphasises the process of fragmentation of production as a configuring element of inter-firm power relationships, and as an explanatory element in working conditions. From a theoretical framework focused on power relations, we analyse by way of a selected case study how the capabilities of companies and their network positions, together with the agency of labour, shape the power relations that influence the evolution of working conditions. The study does indeed find relevant changes to inter-firm relationships, for example, within networks of assemblers and suppliers, but without a consequent re-balancing of power. This finding serves to explain differences in the evolution of working conditions between distinct companies, these conditions being fully functional to a strategy for profitability and thus difficult to reverse.

A large and increasing share of economic activity in modern rich economies can be shown to lie outside what mainstream neoclassical economics itself says it can be applied to: according to neoclassical economics, such activities are unsuited to markets. Since World War II rich economies have de-industrialised, shifted to services. Since the 1970s neoclassical economics has come to dominate policy advice. This worldview justifies state interventions when there is remediable market failure, but it ignores irremediable market failure, where its theory says that markets cannot work efficiently (such as where there is joint production or own consumption). Servicisation, this article argues, has increased and is increasing the extent to which neoclassical economics is, in its own terms, ‘knowably ignorant’. This is because, where service provision is subject to irremediable market failure, neoclassical economics, in its own terms, is inapplicable. The GDP [Gross Domestic Product] share of sub-sectors serving diverse human needs, such as aged care and education, is large and rising. Such sub-sectors are dominated by joint production, manifest as diverse outputs (complex and inter-related changes in the welfare of their diverse clients). Setting aside questions of the wider ‘scientific’ validity of neoclassical theory, the article focuses on its assertion that markets cannot generate economically efficient outcomes in such activities. Arguing that the constrained optimisation of its conceptual world cannot happen in the case of joint production and own consumption of service outputs, neoclassical theory reports itself as unable to determine optimal resource allocation, and so by implication cannot fulfil its role as the foundational basis of state economic policy. Yet the literature shows that the coverage of this theoretical result is not publicised – it is ‘knowable’ but not widely known. The article concludes that, as neoclassical economics is foundational to contemporary state policy, both GDP data and neoclassical theory show that it, and markets, are knowably and increasingly inapplicable. Therefore, mainstream policy thinking continues to face an increasing ‘state of ignorance’, and the cognitive foundations of state policy are correspondingly weak.

This article assesses the historical political economy of the Australian automotive industry alongside the paradigmatic policy shift in economic policy away from protection towards neoliberalism and globalisation. It focuses on the politics of policy change and government assistance, providing a detailed historical narrative of the development and decline of the Australian automotive industry. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s, policy-makers oversaw the decline and fall of the Australian automotive industry. The process of decline occurred within a long-term cycle of new assistance, declining protection, new investment, inadequate restructuring, weak profitability, declining market share, and new assistance. Each cycle, however, was unable to stave off renewed crisis and eventual demise. Over the same period, Australian policy-makers transformed the economy from one of the most protectionist in the developed world to one of the most open. The article outlines the impact of neoliberalism on the automotive industry and analyses what the decline of the industry tells us about how the neoliberal policy structure operates in the ‘actually existing’ political economy. It argues that while the burgeoning neoliberal policy structure in the 1980s and 1990s acted to restrict the range of policy choices available for restructuring the industry, the domestic politics of industry assistance acted to restrict the neoliberal colonisation of the policy agenda. Neoliberal governance has had to contend with political imperatives for continuing assistance, while, at the same time, those political imperatives have been increasingly shaped by neoliberalism.