The international division of labor and embodied working time in trade for the US, the EU and China

Laura Pérez-Sánchez, Raúl Velasco-Fernández and Mario Giampietro

Ecological Economics, 2021, vol. 180, issue C

Abstract: In sustainability analysis, human time is a crucial and overlooked societal limit. Some core countries overcome their time budgets and preserve their socio-economic structures by using energy and importing working time embodied in products and services. This paper analyses the roles of the United States, the European Union, and China in the international division of labor using the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) framework. We calculated working time in production, consumption, and trade both in absolute and per capita terms, for the different economic subsectors in 2011. Energy Metabolic Rates (energy use per hour) and Economic Job Productivity (value-added per hour) complemented the analysis. Whereas the greatest share of the workforce in China was still in agriculture, the US and EU had it in the tertiary sectors by outsourcing large shares of agriculture, mining, and industry: they import about half of the labor time in their consumption. At the global level, the trade of embodied labor is a zero-sum game. This fact questions the long-term viability of the current pattern of development enjoyed by the EU and the US, as well as the possibility for emerging economies to complete a similar transition to a post-industrial economy.

Keywords: International Trade; Limits; Embodied Labor; Externalization; Sustainable Production and Consumption; Unequal Exchange (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092032200X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolec:v:180:y:2021:i:c:s092180092032200x

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106909

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().