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.

The introductory article sets out the background and the content of the Symposium on ‘Law and the Production of Precarious Work in Europe’. The analysis builds on the premise that European (EU) law, together with international and national law, is constitutive of precarious forms of work and work relations in different national and local contexts. The Symposium takes issue with the specific legal frameworks and regimes that are related to structuring various forms of precarious and exploitable labour, by exploring how (EU) law orders the world of work through legal regimes and regulatory frameworks governing specific forms of labour mobility across borders, as well as by looking at the other components of the structures and institutional interactions underlying the broader political economy where precarious forms of work materialise.

Since the 2018 revision of the Posting of Workers Directive, the debate on posting has once again been heated. The spark comes particularly from disputes concerning cross-border mobility of highly mobile workers employed in transnational logistics services (Dobersberger, FNV, Rapidsped, and to a different extent Gruber and Samidani and AFMB). In this set of case law, the Court of Justice of the EU had to consider whether or not, and to what extent, the workers in question should be considered posted workers. Thus, the case law came to revolve around the spatial and territorial attributes, and the cross-border nature of the work performed. By resorting to the analytical tools provided by legal geography, and in particular to the concept of ‘chronotopes of law’ elaborated by Mariana Valverde, the aim of this piece is to reflect upon assumptions and implications of the aforementioned rulings with a view of discussing both structural and contingent elements that possibly favour exploitation of posted work in the transnational logistics industry.

This paper identifies education, skills training and improved social infrastructure as key development issues to address population decline in regions of steady out-migration from the Russian Arctic. Migration flows have mostly stabilised after the sharp and unexpectedly large population decline in the Arctic in the 1990s, during the transition to a market economy. However, the trends set in motion during that collapse, including falling general levels of education, declining size of all but the largest cities, and ageing of the populace, are becoming more serious for some regions, even where government resettlement programmes exist. As young professionals continue to leave, resettling compatriots and hiring shift labour may contribute to the vitality of more resilient regions, for example, Krasnoyarsk and Yamalo-Nenets. However, the European part of the Russian Arctic, despite its critical importance to commerce and to military security, and despite assistance programmes and subsidies, is conforming more to the ageing, less productive contours of neighbouring Arctic states on the periphery of Europe.

The UK, with its relatively liberal immigration policies following recent enlargements, has been one of the main recipients of migrants from new EU member states. This paper poses the questions: what is the effect of immigration on a receiving economy such as the UK? Is the effect beneficial or adverse for growth? Does emigration have brain drain effects on sending economies? How differently would skilled (or unskilled) migration affect both receiving and sending economies? What factors would contribute to immigration/emigration benefits/costs and economic growth driven by migration? Who are the winners and losers in both the sending and host regions? We utilise a two-bloc endogenous growth model with labour mobility of different skill compositions to address these questions. We show that migration, in general, is beneficial to the receiving country and increases the world growth rate. With remittances, the sending country in aggregate can also benefit. The only exception is in the case of unskilled migration, which can actually have a detrimental impact on the world growth rate. This possibility however seems to be unlikely by our examination of migration trends. Winners are migrants, and the skill group in the region that sees its relative size decrease.