The political economy of skill formation

Marius R. Busemeyer

Chapter 16 in Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, 2025, pp 286-302 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on the political economy of skill formation. Skill formation includes, but goes beyond, the acquisition of human capital in the formal education system by taking into account the formation of skills in a workplace context. Therefore, the interplay between the education and training system, labor market institutions and industrial relations is in focus, as they jointly affect the political economy of skill formation. The chapter starts with the classical perspective of human capital theory and its basic distinction between general and specific skills. In the next step, I discuss how institutionalist approaches from the 1980s and 1990s have enriched the picture by pointing to the impact of labor market institutions and industrial relations as factors influencing decisions about skill formation. Subsequently, I lay out how the topic of skill formation gained significant prominence in the context of the Varieties of Capitalism debate, starting in the early 2000s. The final section of the chapter reviews more recent contributions, discussing the implications of the transition toward the knowledge economy, the complex association between skill formation, inequality and social policies as well as the expansion of scholarship on the political economy of skill formation to world regions beyond the OECD world.

Keywords: Skill formation; Institutions; Varieties of Capitalism; Human capital theory; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035327775
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035327782.00028 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:elg:eechap:23093_17

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().