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The paper seeks to directly assess the relationship between immigration and the transformation of the urban service economy through a case study of immigrants in the hotel industry in New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This comparative study of the hotel industry provides a particular good test case for both the restructuring and the replacement labor perspectives. Hotels in major U.S. cities have witnessed a major burst of capital investment in recent years. The industry's growth has been linked to the new sources of urban agglomeration and the pattern of growth has followed the trajectory of market segmentation predicted by the restructuring hypothesis. As hotels have also been a traditional employer of African-Americans focusing on this industry highlights the processes by which jobs are allocated to immigrants or native blacks. By comparing New York, still the quintessential immigrant city, with Philadelphia, a city with few immigrants, the paper assess whether the service sector/immigration interactions are indeed as important as the restructuring hypothesis asserts.

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The concept of the informal sector first introduced in the early 1970s in studies of Africa, has recently gained currency as a tool for understanding the changes under way in the advanced industrial societies. Originally, the concept was used to describe the variety of third world business enterprises characterized by their small scale, ease of entry, labor intensiveness and the evasion of government regulation. The first waves of studies identified the informal sector as a leftover from precapitalist modes of production, subsequent work portrayed the informal sector as an increasingly integral aspect of industrializing third world economies. But the most recent evidence suggests that the informal sector is a first world phenomenon as well. Increasingly, social scientists draw attention to the growing proportion of persons working on their own account, the shift toward smaller firm size, the expanding scope of economic activities whose existence is concealed from the state, the revival of homework and the burgeoning of sweatshops. They conclude from this disparate set of phenomena that the informal sector is alive, well and growing in the postindustrial West. The paper takes a skeptical look at this new version of the informal sector idea by examining a case that is critical for the informal sector claims, the sweatshop phenomenon in New York's garment industry.

For most of the 1980s the New York City economy surged, carrying its expensive municipal government along with it. the fiscal crisis of the middle 1970s had become a nearly forgotten product of fiscal mismanagement and the death throes of the industrial economy. The city framed its budget according to accepted accounting principles and with its newly achieved satisfactory bond rating, it could once again market its general obligation bonds. New York's restructured economy, based in finance and advanced services, reaffirmed its enhanced status as global city. Then, just as rapidly as the boom began, it ended. The 1987 stock market crash constituted the first harbinger of decline, nevertheless New York's economy continued to grow for the next two years, albeit at a slower pace. By the end of 1989, however, almost all indicators had turned down and for the years 1990 and 19991 New York City showed declines in employment, a virtually total real-estate slump and a drastic shortfall in tax revenues as compared to anticipated receipts. The paper examines the causes and outcomes of the two post-1970 fiscal crises to indicate the links between New York's economic base, the financial condition of its government, its politics and the way in which these factors intertwine.

This paper explores social and spatial dimensions in the world car industry with a view to better understanding the variations in the ways transnational production systems are organized by companies in various industries in various parts of the world. Japanese corporations have forged the world's most competitive auto production system. The challenge from Japan has forced enterprises and governments in the developed capitalist societies to confront anew how they organize their own production systems and how it is that production systems become the mainsprings for economic development and change. Japanese companies will serve as the major, United States companies the minor, reference points in the comparison of transnational production systems in the world car industry. The Japanese automobile industry experienced massive growth after World War II. Toyota and Nissan went from insignificant companies in the 1940s to the world's, second and third largest car makers by the early 1980s. A key to the competitive international success of Japanese companies is the way they organize and tightly control their many layered production systems.

The aim of this paper is to show that the "Massachusetts miracle" is based on services sector job growth rather than on the manufacturing-based industrial policy to which it is usually attributed and to argue that in the new situation of very low levels of unemployment the priority is for an employment policy directed at the needs of low-paid service sector workers rather than further job creation. Authors start by providing a selective overview of Massachusetts industrial policy during politician Michael Dukakis' administrations. They then evaluate the Massachusetts miracle and attempt to delineate the contradictions between employment policy and industrial policy that are emerging in the full employment state. After considering at some length the political and ideological grounds for the manufacturing focus of state economic policy and the obstacles to services-based policy, they turn to the needs of the new workforce and a series of proposals that are currently. transforming the labor movement and policy agenda in Massachusetts.

The article focuses on Buffalo in New York City as a typical example of many other declining industrial centres. Although still a major manufacturing centre in New York Buffalo has suffered a sustained decline in industrial employment over the last decade. The article suggests that for Buffalo this process of decline has led to a fairly entrenched relationship between economic growth and social distribution namely that most kinds of economic growth lead to a worsening of distribution. This relationship is rather stable to other ongoing changes in the economy such as the long run trend from manufacturing to service activities. It also does not appear to be affected greatly by economic policies as diverse as the promotion of new economic activity versus support for older sectors. The first section of the article highlights the key income flows in the Buffalo economy followed by general discussion of the internal structure of the economy that shows the relationship between growth and social distribution.

Since the 1970s, centralized interventions into the infrastructural affairs of US cities have been in decline. As a result, local entities have been compelled to shoulder a greater share of the burden for developing the urban infrastructure networks and public works needed to support growth. Under conditions of neoliberalism, local officials and growth-machine participants have pursued this local infrastructural imperative by means of increasingly speculative and risky financing strategies deployed through the ‘back door’ of traditional democratic channels. The following analysis is empirically focused on three Californian cities — Emeryville, Oxnard and Vallejo — which achieved impressive levels of growth around the turn of the twenty-first century. However, these cities subsequently suffered precipitous economic contraction. As such, they demonstrate the unprecedented challenges now facing the urban growth machine in the wake of the current global economic crisis. Two emergent challenges, in particular, appear poised to challenge the historical resiliency of the growth machine: the ‘reverse infrastructural trap’ and nascent conflicts between municipal bondholders and municipal employees. The cases presented here thus raise important questions about the continued viability of the pro-growth agenda in the context of structural fiscal deficits, chronic infrastructural decline and extreme capital-market volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing policy in the developing world has usually been shaped by social and political considerations, yet housing can also be used to promote economic development. From the 1930s to the 1950s, it was increasingly deployed for this purpose by the agencies of colonial powers, including Britain and France; by the United States in Puerto Rico; and by the US Agency for International Development and the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America. By the mid-1960s, the UN and affiliated agencies, notably the International Labour Office, had a keen and broad appreciation of its significance for economic policy. This understanding was temporarily swamped by rising social concerns and then sidelined when the World Bank began to support sites-and-services schemes in the 1970s. It reasserted itself in the 1980s in the form of ‘market enabling’ strategies which, however, too often became an excuse for inaction. This history underlines the importance of paying attention to the potential role of housing as a tool of economic development. Dans le monde en développement, la configuration de la politique du logement tient généralement à des aspects sociaux et politiques, alors que le logement peut aussi servir à promouvoir l’expansion économique. Des années 1930 à 1950, c’est dans ce but qu’elle a été mise en œuvre par les organes des puissances coloniales, dont la Grande-Bretagne et la France, par les États-Unis à Puerto Rico, ainsi que par l’agence de développement international des États-Unis (USAID) et la Banque interaméricaine de développement en Amérique latine. Au milieu des années 1960, l’ONU et ses agences, notamment le Bureau International du Travail, ont émis un avis général tranché quant à son importance en politique économique. Cette idée a été temporairement submergée par l’apparition de problèmes sociaux, puis mise sur la touche lorsque la Banque mondiale a soutenu les projets Sites et services dans les années 1970. Elle s’est réimplantée dans les années 1980 sous la forme de stratégies de stimulation de marché qui, toutefois, ont trop souvent servi d’excuse au manque d’action. Cet historique souligne l’intérêt à accorder au rôle potentiel du logement en tant qu’outil de développement économique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights that Detroit, Michigan faces a grim future of high unemployment, growing demands on the municipal budget and a shrinking revenue base. Historically, the economic health of the region has been intertwined with cyclical variations in the vitality of the U.S. automobile industry. When the industry experienced hard times, so would the residents of the Detroit metropolitan region. The article contends that the world system of capitalism is undergoing a transition from a period in which national economies in the older industrial regions were dominated by monopoly firms and were adequately understood as monopoly capitalist social formations to a period in which the global firm is dominant and the dominant form of the capitalist mode of production is to be understood as global capitalism. As global capitalism takes shape the function of Detroit and other cities in the older regions in the world division of labour becomes transformed. The crisis of Detroit is rooted in this transition from monopoly to global capitalism.

This article focuses on the ideology of the urban fiscal crisis and its uses. There is an orthodox explanation for the crisis that besets cities in the United States today--that it is organic and inevitable. That explanation is not only wrong, it is also a weapon in perpetuating the results it purports to describe. It is used to target the costs of that crisis against those already at the bottom of the totem pole. The underlying crises--the economic crisis arising from the existing relations of production, and the crisis of the state which accompanies it--are ever-present as tendencies. But their specific present form, the urban fiscal crisis, is not an inherent result of these tendencies towards crisis, but rather an artificial crisis, controlled by and targeted against specific groups. The particular forms and consequences of the urban crisis at any given moment must thus be directly related to the historical changes in the political balance of forces, as well as to the economic situation.