Accounting for Big-City Growth in Low-Paid Occupations: Immigration and/or Service-Class Consumption

Ian Gordon and Ioannis Kaplanis ()

Economic Geography, 2014, vol. 90, issue 1, 67-90

Abstract: The growth of “global cities” in the 1980s was supposed to have involved an occupational polarization, including the increase in low-paid service jobs. Although held to be untrue for European cities at the time, some such growth did emerge in London a decade later than first reported for New York. The question is whether there was simply a delay before London conformed to the global city model or whether another distinct cause was at work in both cases. This article proposes that the critical factor in both cases was actually an upsurge of immigration from poor countries that provided an elastic supply of cheap labor. This hypothesis and its counterpart based on the growth in elite jobs are tested econometrically for the British case with regional data spanning 1975–2008, finding some support for both effects, but with immigration from poor countries as the crucial influence in late 1990s London.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ecge.12026 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Accounting for big-city growth in low-paid occupations: immigration and/or service-class consumption (2014)
Working Paper: Accounting for Big City Growth in Low Paid Occupations: Immigration and/or Service Class Consumption (2012)
Working Paper: Accounting for big city growth in low paid occupations: immigration and/or service class consumption (2012)
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:bla:ecgeog:v:90:y:2014:i:1:p:67-90

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0095

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Geography is currently edited by Yuko Aoyama, Amy Glasmeier, Gernot Grabher and Henry Wai-chung Yeung

More articles in Economic Geography from Clark University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().