The Great American Job Creation Machine in Comparitive Perspective

Harold L. Wilensky

Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series from Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley

Abstract: Data on 18 rich democracies 1968-87 show that job creation is mainly a product of demographic changes (age structure, net migration rates) and changes in social structure (the rate of family breakup as it relates to poverty and the history of female labor-force participation) -- clues to an increased supply of young and/or cheap labor. Job creation is unrelated to unemployment rates or other measures of economic performance and their causes; it comes at the cost of lower earnings growth and slower long-run productivity gains. If job creation is little affected by demand policies, the appropriate response is less boasting about employment gains and more attention to a strategy to reshape the supply and quality of labor -- e.g., active labor-market and education policies, a family policy, policies to reduce industrial conflict.

Keywords: Wilensky; American; job creation; comparative (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1991-08-01
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/53w542zm.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:indrel:qt53w542zm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series from Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().