Author : Roshan Kumar Pandian
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 155 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (721 download)
Book Synopsis Globalization of Production, Manufacturing Employment, and Income Distribution in Developing Economies by : Roshan Kumar Pandian
Download or read book Globalization of Production, Manufacturing Employment, and Income Distribution in Developing Economies written by Roshan Kumar Pandian and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent decades have seen significant transformations in the global economy. While the globalization of production has meant that a larger share of global manufacturing activity now occurs in the Global South compared to three decades ago, globalization has been uneven in its impact, with some developing nations starting to lose manufacturing shares of employment at much lower levels of development compared to rich countries. Further, this global reorganization of the manufacturing sector has coincided with rising income inequality within most countries around the world. Additionally, starting in the 2000s, global inequality turned to decline substantially, reversing a trend of rising global inequality since the middle of the nineteenth century. This dissertation contributes to the literature on how the globalization of production has shaped development and inequality among developing nations. In the first study, I examine the factors that have affected employment (de)industrialization in the Global South. While past research has been suggestive about the role of external factors in shaping manufacturing share of employment in developing nations, this work has not empirically examined the role of globalization in shaping employment outcomes. I develop two measures of manufacturing export performance and demonstrate their importance in shaping trends in manufacturing share of employment in developing nations over the recent decades. In the second study, I bring together the literatures on the distributional consequences of globalization and sector labor shifts to examine how the effects of manufacturing share of employment on inequality are contingent on the sector's level of global integration. Using panel data on developing countries since 1970, I find that while manufacturing share of employment is negatively associated with income inequality, this equalizing effect diminishes with increased global integration. In the third study, I examine the causes of the substantial decline in between-country inequality in the 2000s. While past research has argued that industrializing developing nations were the principal cause of the decline in inequality, this claim has not been empirically examined. I perform counterfactual simulation analyses to identify countries that were most important for the decline in between-country inequality, before drawing on country-specific descriptive data and secondary growth literature to examine the growth episodes of these high-influence countries. These analyses reveal that (1) a substantial proportion of the decline in between-country inequality during the 2000s is accounted for by the slower growth of rich nations, and (2) existing literature has overstated the role of industrial transformation in developing nations in driving down inequality. More broadly, findings from this dissertation raise concerns about the sustainability of globalization in producing broad-based and inclusive manufacturing-led development in the Global South.
