Comment on Sanjay Jain, Devesh Kapur, and Sharun W. Mukand

Johannes Bröcker
Additional contact information
Johannes Bröcker: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

A chapter in Labor Mobility and the World Economy, 2006, pp 205-207 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This paper asks why the recent wave of job movements to low-wage foreign countries has provoked such a strong political backlash in the United States, stronger than the movement of manufacturing jobs that has been observed ever since the United States has been a part of the world market. The authors’ answer is briefly this: even taking the case of an equal number of workers that lose their job in both industries, there are more persons potentially threatened in the service industry. In other words, even with an equal number of those actually hurt ex post, there are more “vulnerables” ex ante in the service sector. Why? Because their qualifications are of a “general purpose” type, while those of manufacturing workers are “specific purpose” qualifications. If shoe production is supposed to relocate to Mexico, say, than only the small group of shoe producing workers is “vulnerable.” If services are relocated to India, say, then the large group of IT workers is vulnerable and produces more unrest than the small group of shoe producers. This, as the authors claim, holds true even if the number of those eventually loosing their job is the same in both cases.

Keywords: General Purpose; Comparative Advantage; Majority Vote; Service Industry; Complementary Factor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-31045-7_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783540310457

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-31045-7_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().