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Temporary cross-border movement of service providers is a form of trade in labour services. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) provides a framework for liberalizing such trade flows. There has, however, been little progress in the GATS negotiations on movement of service providers or mode 4, especially with regard to low-skilled movement. This is in contrast to several bilateral arrangements that cover low-skilled labour mobility. This article outlines the desirable characteristics of selected bilateral labour agreements that facilitate the movement of low-skilled workers. It argues that the GATS mode 4 negotiations could draw upon these desirable features to improve market access commitments for less-skilled service providers while also addressing host country sensitivities. It outlines possible ways of incorporating these features into the GATS framework of commitments and limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent British welfare reform involves the creation of a managed welfare market for the delivery of employment programmes. This article critically reviews evidence on the development and impacts of such markets in Australia, the USA and the Netherlands. It considers the emergence of problems with 'creaming' and 'parking' of participants and the challenges that 'market makers' must meet if they are to secure anticipated improvements in service delivery and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses Jan Rutkowski's paper on the closed feudal system, wherein the lord and the peasants are the only participants in the division of income. Rutkowski states that income in a pure cash-rent-based system is created by the peasants on their holdings, in which part of this income is taken by the lord in the form of tributes and rents, and the second part is left to the peasant. Furthermore, the differences between the economic roles of cash rent and labor service are discussed.

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Copyright of Historia Mexicana is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Measuring labor and capital services accurately is essential to obtaining reliable estimates of production functions and total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Using data on the operating time of capital, a series that exists for the French business sector, greatly improves the measurement of effective capital services in production. The ensuing estimation results are consistent with Cobb–Douglas technology under constant returns to scale, with the factor elasticities not statistically different from their income shares. In the same framework, TFP growth is estimated as a latent variable and found to be less volatile than accounting residuals, negatively correlated with employment, and free of cyclicality. It is statistically best estimated as a first-order autoregressive process, with an autoregressive coefficient of 0.95. Total factor productivity growth was estimated to have declined steadily between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, but the rate of decline has diminished since then. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Key workers provide a single point of contact for disabled children and their families, supporting them and facilitating access to other services. Key worker services appear to generate good outcomes for families and provision is encouraged through central government policy. Recent increases in key worker provision have been accompanied by a proliferation of delivery models yet there is very little information on their costs. Methods Within a study identifying which service characteristics generate good outcomes for families, unit costs for seven key worker services were estimated. Informed by economic theory, the estimates drew on data from managers, finance departments and other publicly available sources. Data on the frequency and duration of contact with key workers were obtained from families and combined with the service-specific unit costs to arrive at the contact cost per family. The variations in the costs of supporting families were explored. Results On average, key worker contact with disabled children and their families cost £151 over a 3-month period. Contact costs were found to vary with the level of the child's disability and the number of role aspects that key workers performed. This latter variable was associated with improved outcomes. Conclusion The low response rate to the questionnaire and absence of data on the costs of other elements of the families' support packages may limit generalization from this study. Even so, such findings can help inform managers and planners about allocation of their scarce resources. Good-quality services appear to cost more but the relationship between cost, quality and outcomes is not a simple one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The funding of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence illustrated the importance attributed to the support of the Yishuv in the war effort. In addition to recruitment of man power and mobilization of the economy that support also included the public's participation in raising the means to fund the war. This article discusses the characteristics of this process, which began with the voluntary loan For the Security of the People in November 1947 and ended with the national loan in December 1948. The effects of the change and transition brought about by acceleration of the fighting and the establishment of the State of Israel, and at its core the increasing involvement of the State and its centralist power, are apparent in the public's participation in raising the funds. This paper focuses on the mobilizing role of the civil organizations and at their core the middle class economic organizations and the Histadrut. The paper delineates the manner in which the structure of the society, the effort to widen the scope of the mobilization, and the endeavor to obtain the public's support in the war effort required setting cooperative arrangements and economic and political coordination. Evasion of fund raising was revealed and the demand for increased involvement of the State as part of the realization of the ‘equality in sacrifice’ principle during war was brought to the forefront of the public agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study on the labor process theory through the division of labor power into two elements such as labor effort and labor mobility. The labor process theory focuses upon the conflictual relations between workers and managers in the production process, especially on the effort or wage bargain. The study indicated that the separation of labor services into effort and mobility power that workers possess and employers seek to manage, is more realistic than considering solely on the labor process in terms of production. It has been found out that control strategies on labor power are not only about production indeterminacies of labor but also mobility indeterminacy.

Most applications of Nash bargaining over wages ignore between-employer competition for labor services and attribute all of the workers' rent to their bargaining power. In this paper, we write and estimate an equilibrium model with strategic wage bargaining and on-the-job search and use it to take another look at the determinants of wages in France. There are three essential determinants of wages in our model: productivity, competition between employers resulting from on-the-job search, and the workers' bargaining power. We find that between-firm competition matters a lot in the determination of wages, because it is quantitatively more important than wage bargaining a la Nash in raising wages above the workers' "reservation wages," defined as out-of-work income. In particular, we detect no significant bargaining power for intermediate- and low-skilled workers, and a modestly positive bargaining power for high-skilled workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on discussions and politics surrounding the labor services in the U.S. and Sweden against the backdrop of the Nazi model, the Great Depression and the second world war. Labor services is a combination of work and education. The dictatorship under Adolf Hitler advertised labor service as a symbol of national socialism. Features of the history of American and Swedish labor services can be explained by examining how their German counterparts were perceived in these countries.

Presents several photographs depicting the performance of kar seva, a form of voluntary labor normally associated with the cleaning of the pool or sarovar surrounding the Harimandar or Golden Temple on March 25, 2004 to mark the 400th anniversary of the installation of the Adi Granth in the Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, India.

The purpose of this article is to decompose demand changes for factor input and explore the factor that information technology (IT) capital stock has largely increased in Japan. The Allen partial elasticities of substitution are calculated and the variations in factor input demand are broken down into two effects--price effect and output effect, using industry-level data. From an estimation of the total cost function, the following conclusions are presented. While IT capital stock and ordinary capital stock are complementary, IT serves as a substitute for labor. The factors influencing the high growth rate in IT capital stock are the decrease in the prices of IT and ordinary capital services, and the increase in the labor price, in addition to the output effect. On the other hand, labor demand declines due to both the downward rigidity of wages and the decrease in prices of two kinds of capital services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the history of the German Labor Service. Development of many of the service's organizations and ideological features in the 19th and early 20th centuries; Number of volunteers employed by the government in 1932 under various schemes in work camps; Advocacy of the idea of compulsory work camp in the Weimar Republic.

This paper argues that discursive strategies are an important component of local labour control regimes. Institutional approaches to the relationships between capital, labour and the state need to be supplemented with an awareness of the power of representational devices to shape the range of viable options open to participants in the labour system. We use a case study of Singapore’s labour market in the late 1990s to illustrate the argument, looking in particular at the labour market discourses mobilised to justify responses to the Asian economic crisis. Firstly, we consider how a discourse of exogenous forcing was used to portray the necessity of short-term salary and benefit cuts for preserving regional competitiveness. Secondly, we analyse how the retrenchment of workers during the crisis was discursively constructed as providing opportunities for the retraining and upskilling of ‘model workers’ in the medium to long term. The discursive tropes deployed in this instance ranged from modernity and developmentalism, to national security. A variety of textual evidence from government speeches and the Singapore press is used to illustrate our argument. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this article, I derive expressions for the Morishima elasticities of substitution (MES) for the variable profit function and estimate these elasticities to shed some light on the substitutability between imports, capital services, and labor services. The results reveal that capital services and imports are Morishima substitutes, irrespective of whether the price of capital services or imports changes, and imports and labor services are also Morishima substitutes, irrespective of whether the price of imports or the wage rate changes. Thus, an increase in the price of U.S. imports (through tariffs or duties) will result in substitution (in the Morishima sense) into labor and capital services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on the efforts made in converting day treatment programs to supported employment services by the Rhode Island Department of Mental Health, Retardation, and Hospitals. Necessities for vocational services expressed by mental health consumers; Provisions made by the Rhode Island Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, Division of Integrated Mental Health Services (DIMHS); Additional information on the DIMHS.

The collaboration among people is often subject to shirking; the net gain from the collaboration depends on the contract governing it. I argue that the entrepreneur assumes the role of the residual claimant because his actions are more costly to monitor than those of the factors with which he collaborates. By offering fixed pay contracts to others and himself becoming residual claimant, the entrepreneur curtails his incentive to gain at the expense of his partners, and the net gain from the collaboration is then maximized. Costly monitoring applies to both labor and capital, and thus the entrepreneur may supply both labor services and capital. The entrepreneur's capital serves to guarantee the pay of the other factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a econometric analysis of determining consumer's surplus. There are two distinct approaches in the literature to the analysis of consumer's surplus. The first seeks to determine what restrictions on preferences are necessary for some measure of consumer's surplus to serve as an exact welfare indicator. The second is concerned with finding approximations to an exact welfare indicator without restrictions on preferences. In determining consumer's surplus, consider an economy in which convex social indifference curves exist. These can be described by means of an expenditure function E(p.u), where p is a vector of prices and u is the level of utility or social welfare, which need only have ordinal significance. Let m denote lump-sum or transfer income: this is to be distinguished from income earned by the sale of labor services, which is handled by letting labor services be another commodity and incorporating the wage rate in the vector p. Another approach is by considering an economy consisting of H consumers with identical tastes but differing transfer incomes mh for h = 1. 2, ..., H. One can assume that the integrability condition (10) is satisfied for each consumer. This turns out to allow aggregation over consumers.

The quantity and marginal productivity of farm husband and wife labor services allocated to their own farm work are assessed. A behavioral model of the farm firm is developed and implemented empirically by fitting a production function to county average per farm data for 1964 for Iowa, North Carolina, and Oklahoma counties. A comparison of marginal products of husband's and wife's labor inputs with opportunity costs yields the implication that net rural-to-urban human migration and reallocation of working time between own-farm and off-farm work by the remaining farm population bad succeeded in getting rid of excess labor services in U.S. agricultural production in 1964. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper formulates and estimates alternative models for the pricing of labor services. We present economic models that rationalize empirical specifications in the literature and we offer evidence on the validity of those specifications Widely used efficiency units models of labor services are inconsistent with evidence from the U.S. labor market A model of heterogeneous skills provides a more accurate description of earnings data. We present evidence that the pursuit of comparative advantage and selective migration are important features of the U S labor market. When these features are included m the model, the only support for an effect of schooling quality on earnings is through the return to college education. Three interactions are empirically important in explaining log wage equations (A) between schooling quality and education, (B) between regional labor market shocks and education and (C) between region-of-residence and region-of-birth Because of this third interaction, which can arise from comparative advantage in the labor market, no unique quality effect on returns to education can be defined independently of the market in which it is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we have emphasized the implications of sequential heterogeneity for a general equilibrium model in which different labor services are exchanged for one another. It might be interesting to sacrifice both the symmetry and the general equilibrium nature of the present approach, and to focus on a more traditional labor market in which labor services are sold by workers and bought by firms. The decision to use hourly wage rates or some kind of incentive system is largely determined by institutional factors and may be regarded as given for most problems. It might be revealing, however, to analyze some of the implications of this decision, and the transition from one wage system to another within the conceptual framework developed in this paper. Our argument suggests that workers should prefer piece rates to hourly wages. The question then arises whether and to what extent workers have been affected by the trend away from incentive systems and towards the use of hourly wages, and to what extent fringe benefits may have been used to compensate labor for this presumably negative effect. Some of these issues will be addressed in a subsequent paper [7]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses changes in the Employment Cost Index (ECI), which is designed to measure change in the price of a standardized mix of labor services in the U.S. Extension of coverage to fringe benefits; Rate of wage and salary changes in the ECI; Comparison with other wage series.

Initially, historians of the economico-juridical' school put forward the view that the expansion of the north-central Italian communes between the mid twelfth century and the thirteenth transformed town-country relations. While this view has since been considerably extended and refined, it is generally accepted that the city states of central and northern Italy did exploit the countryside through inequitable rates of taxation, regulations restricting most trade and industry to the ruling town, compulsory labor services, and judicial support for citizens' claims over their rural tenants. This article first of all discusses how the political order affected the size and economic contribution of late medieval towns, and the rate of regional economic integration. It contrasts the effects of changing institutional relations between town and country, between the towns themselves, and between towns and the state. Secondly, developments in clothmaking are used to assess the effect of social and political conflict on regional market structures, both on the division of labor between town and country and on regional integration as a whole.

Comments on the patterns of international trade in services in the political economy. Definition of trade in services; Implication of technological innovation for labor trade; Impact of transnational corporations growth on the organization in the services sector.

Empirical studies, in which the number of workers (N) and average hours worked per worker (H) have been treated as separate variables in the production function, appear to show that their respective output elasticities ( &b.eta;N and &b.eta;H) are different. Several explanations have been advanced. For example, scholars M.S. Feldstein and R. Craine have argued that this observation may be due to some portion of H being a fixed labor cost, devoted to coffee breaks, setting-up time and/or average hours in excess of some normal level, H being paid an overtime premium. Both observations are, of course, static assumptions and it will become evident below that neither are necessary in order to obtain the above result. This paper examines the behaviour of a net present value maximizing firm which incurs costs whenever it adjusts the number of its employees, that is N a quasi-fixed factor. The costs of adjustment refer to expenses which arise from search, training, hiring and firing and the existence of a personnel office. This paper has attempted to provide an alternative explanation of the empirical result &b.eta;N >1 > &b.eta;H.

The article discusses the regional demand for labour services. The simple adaptation of the Oi model in previous studies on the regional demand for labour services reflects the reduction in labour accumulation in the labour market including a boost in the elasticity of employment with respect to output. The author highlights that one of the notable grounds of unemployment is unemployment itself and that various aspects of the work done on short run employment functions, work done on labour hoarding, and work done on the increase in unemployment in Great Britain are interrelated.

Focuses on the women in the Women's Labor Service in the National Socialist regime in Germany. Definition of the labor service scheme by the Third Reich; One-dimensional conflict between the pragmatic and ideological conceptions of the Women's Labor Service; Performance of compulsory services of women in war work.

Examines the impact of changes in the rate of growth of the money supply. Determination of demand functions for capital and labor services; Estimation of the expected rate of inflation; Increase of the nominal income.

This article examines labor-service tenancy contracts in Latin America by bridging the theory of contracts and agrarian structure. Two main streams of thought can be contrasted in the modern literature on the theory of agrarian organization. In one, studies of interlinkages in market transactions have shed significant new insights on the nature of agrarian social relations. These studies attribute particular importance to the risk of defaulting on loans. The interlinkages of a land, labor, or product transaction with a credit transaction are shown to serve to circumvent the problems of finding adequate collateral or an enforceable mode of repayment that protects the lender against defaulting by the borrower. By contrast, in the other stream of thought, studies on tenancy have given little attention to the fact that tenants may default on rent obligations. While dualism is a pervasive characteristic of the Latin American agrarian structure, its particular institutional forms have evolved over time. The study of the labor-service contract therefore appears at the junction of the literatures on contract and on agrarian structure and, in the latter, exemplifies the functionality of a dualistic agrarian structure created by the landlords themselves.

The present size of the hidden economy in Norway is between 4 and 6 percent of GDP, of which hidden labor income constitutes about half. A survey approach reveals that 4/5 of the population is of the opinion that people in general accept income from moonlighting that is not reported, and 2/3 believes that this share of acceptance is on the increase. Furthermore, surveys clearly show that hidden labor services are of satisfactory quality, that they mainly are paid for in cash, but with checks being increasingly used, and that buyers find it easier to obtain services from the hidden labor market than from the regular one. A shortening of the work week in order to alleviate unemployment may result in an increased supply of hidden labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents economist Wesley C. Mitchell's address on money economy and modern civilization. Money economy, a term brought into vogue by economist Bruno Hilderbrand, is characterized by the fact that most exchanges are conducted by payment in money, instead of payments in kind or in instruments of credit. It came into being at a time when the barter economy was gradually reorganized along pecuniary lines. This reorganization was effected by the commutation of labour services and dues in kind, into money payments. Another momentous social change in the evolution of money economy was the rise of a wage-earning class of day labourers. These phases in the evolution of money economy became more pronounced in the 15th century when the Hundred Year War accelerated the process as feudal society committed suicide and land came to be regarded as a source less of power than of wealth. In the nascent money economy, Mitchell further maintains, most prices were regulated by government or by some recognized semi-public authority and fluctuation in prices were relatively rare. In the age of modern economy, however, most prices are fixed by negotiations between individuals.

A dualistic farm structure and increasing integration of the most populous category of farms (i.e., small farms) in the nonfarm economy are two of the most striking features of farm structure. Previous research has shown that the sale of labor services by members of farm families has an impact of substantial importance in reducing the scale of farming but increased family income. However, because the farm, rather than the farm family, has been the predominant conceptual focus, relatively little has been done to study the effects of the multiple work statuses of adult family members on farm performance and the effects of off-farmwork on the labor and capital processes of the farm business. Data from a 1979 Kentucky survey are used to analyze the relationship between farm acreage and sales and (1) type of farm family, as reflected in the farm versus nonfarm work statuses of men and women, and (2) the types of occupations and industries of those who work off the farm. It is concluded that the pattern of work statuses of farm family members has (1) an important impact on the labor process in farm production, (2) that this varies by type of occupation of the person(s) employed off the farm, and (3) the effects of off-farm employment on farm business performance differ for men and women due to differences in their involvement in the farm labor process and the inputs of each to farm production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The observed practice of contracting for labor services in advance introduces stickiness or friction into the economic system. In the presence of monetary and real stochastic disturbances the stability of the levels of employment and output hinges on the nature of the wage contracts. In this paper we demonstrate the existence of optimal indexation schemes that are capable of eliminating the aforementioned friction by duplicating the equilibrium that would obtain if labor services were contracted for after the stochastic disturbances were realized. Unanticipated inflation in conjunction with the widespread use of nominal contracts is likely to produce substantial income distribution effects. The indexation of nominal contracts in general and of wage contracts in particular has been suggested as a means of mitigating these effects. Indexation, however, may affect the stability of the economy. Various authors, including Gray (1976, 1978), Fisher (1977b), Cukierman (1980), Danziger (1981), and Pazner (1981), have analyzed the consequences of wage indexation for macroeconomic fluctuations. The consensus that seems to emerge from these studies is that while full indexation of the nominal wage rate to the price level is an effective means of insulating real variables from the impact of monetary disturbances (a restatement of the neutrality of money), it may exacerbate the effects on real variables of real disturbances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the impact of Leontiff Paradox on political economy in the United States. Determination of the net export of labor services; Relevance of free-trade equilibrium on net exports; Effect of balance of trade surplus on labor requirement.

The paper describes Johnstown, Pennsylvania labor market area's problem of manpower utilization that frequently is overlooked by community economic developers and planners. The traditional explanation for the relatively high rate of labor force out-migration has emphasized the absolute shortage of employment opportunities to the exclusion of any significant awareness of the stimulus to out-migration that is provided by a discrepancy between the quality demanded and the quality supplied of labor force talents. A failure to appreciate this facet of the manpower problem has rendered the Johnstown community incapable of promoting any relatively significant rise in its per capita income in the past ten years, despite the entry of new firms to the area. The new jobs appear to have discouraged the community's newly produced human resources from remaining in Johnstown. The job may be there, but the structure of incentives remains relatively unattractive by virtue of this narrow interpretation of the manpower problem.

Pursuing the methods by which Leontiel discovered his renowned paradox, previous empirical studies of the relationship among factors of production and trade have computed the factor content of a single country's trade from the factor requirements of its production processes. The present article introduces a somewhat different method. The assumption is made that all manufactured goods traded not only by the United States but by other countries as well, are produced with a single set of technical coefficients, namely the combinations of labor skills observed in each industry in the United States. Direct capital requirements are not as high in manufacturing as in most other activities. Labor appears to be less mobile internationally than liquid capital or capital goods. Generations of industrial experience and education may be required to build a skilled labor force. Industries obviously do not use the same factor combinations everywhere. If skill availabilities determines the trade patterns and if each country's production coefficients are highly correlated with those of any other country, a set of production coefficients from any one country should furnish insights into every country's trade picture.

In recent years the cyclical behaviour of the relationship between output and employment has become the subject of many interesting theoretical and empirical investigations. In the United States Dhrymes, Hultgren, Kuh, Solow and Wilson and Eckstein have analysed labour productivity and elaborated the implications of its cyclical pattern for income distribution, profit mark-ups, adjustment costs, etc. Similar work has been done in the United Kingdom by Godley and Shepherd, Neild and, more recently, by Ball and St. Cyr. In this paper the results of a further analysis of the British data will be presented. We shall operate with a model which contains an underlying employment demand function and a short-term employment adjustment process. The employment demand function relates the desired level of employment to a number of exogenous variables and the adjustment process describes the adjustment of actual to desired employment. It would appear that the explicit recognition of the adjustment process is necessary, first, for the correct interpretation of actual employment figures (and, hence, of labour productivity as conventionally calculated) and, second, for the estimation of the desired level of employment. Our procedure is based on the fundamental assumption that the underlying employment demand function and the adjustment process are sufficient for the explanation of movements in employment, so that labour supply conditions and other factors are quantitatively unimportant. In the following section a brief sketch of the model will be given. Part II is devoted to a statistical examination of the employment demand function. In part Ill the model will be examined for structural changes and in part IV the quantitative importance of our results will be analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on wage policies of trade unions. The term policy here is used to imply that trade unions have some discretion and alternatives in the bargaining process through which terms of the labor bargain are determined, that some types of wage strategy and pattern will be found superior to others by a trade union, given its objectives and specific problems, and the mechanism whereby a trade union experiments with tactics and chooses among them need not connote an entirely self conscious process. An investigation of trade union wage policy may be thought to be an elucidation of the obvious since the only objectives are more favorable wage structure. The interesting issues arise in examining the formulation of broad wage policies and the selection of detailed wage tactics. The terms of sale for labor services are typically complex, either designating or implying a great many conditions. Some of these terms directly influence the price, that is the wage, defined as the amount of money exchanged between the buyer and seller per unit of services.

The article reports that from the numerous social and religious thinkers voicing a gospel after the First World War, one emerged with a communitarian evangel: Eberhard Arnold. Frustrated people, wishing to make life more meaningful, began to explore the possibility of living a community life. Arnold led them to found a community at Sannerz in Hesse-Nassau in 1920. This moved to the Rhoen-Bruderhof in 1926. There it existed with great success until the rise of the Nazis. A number of its members emigrated to Liechtenstein in 1933, to be followed by others. Finally, the Rhoen-Bruderhof became a special object of Gestapo attention and on April 14, 1937, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the Bruderhof was taken over by forty officials of the State Secret Police of Kassel and dissolved. The buildings became a house for a detachment of the Labor Service, and the three executive members of the community, Hans Meier, Hans Boiler and Karl Keiderling were imprisoned. Ail the others were allowed to leave Germany but each one was only permitted to take a small bundle of clothing.