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Copyright of Continuing Professional Education: Theory & Practice is the property of Continuing Professional Education: Theory & Practice and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Economía del Rosario is the property of Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Senora del Rosario and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The majority of mainstream economists believe that globalization and trade liberalization have had a minor role in increasing U.S. wage inequality. A minority argues that capital mobility and outsourcing indicate a larger effect. This paper first surveys these views, and then argues that how we understand the policy consequences of trade liberalization helps determine the character our analysis of the issue itself. Thus, a shift in policy perspective, to consider the "equity costs" of trade liberalization in terms of eroded U.S. labor market institutions, produces a larger framework for analyzing the consequences of globalization and trade liberalization than is available in traditional comparative advantage efficiency reasoning. From this wider perspective, trade liberalization has likely had a greater impact on U.S. wage inequality than even the minority mainstream position allows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic inequality is soaring and the consensus in some circles is that corporations' myopic focus on profits is largely to blame. At first glance a stakeholder approach would seem an appealing solution: surely if the purpose of corporations was not wealth maximization for shareholders, but rather to create value for all constituents--thus including employees, customers, suppliers, and communities--we would make strides towards combatting inequality, the theory goes. Corporations themselves, through their powerful lobbying group, the Business Roundtable, recently disclaimed shareholder primacy and embraced stakeholder theory. However, far from successfully redressing inequality, a stakeholder approach is unlikely to achieve meaningful redistribution of power and resources to weaker constituents and would likely work in the opposite direction. We suggest that a stakeholder approach gives corporate executives both a sword and a shield with which to preserve their advantageous status quo. First, executives can justify stepped up lobbying efforts as part of their mandate to consider the interests of all constituents, capturing the agenda with respect to distributing more power and resources to weaker constituents. Second, because a switch to a stakeholder approach would appear as a significant change--despite not actually accomplishing meaningful redistribution--it would require significant political capital to be adopted, and once adopted would occupy an outsized portion of legislative and regulatory space, depleting energy and resources necessary to pass reform that is more likely to actually impact inequality. In fact, in reviewing the likely drivers of inequality, we find that key factors include higher concentration leading to the shrinking of the labor share and increased monopsony in labor markets, the gradual weakening of worker protections from labor market institutions, and giving up on progressive taxation as a redistributive mechanism. Broadening corporate purpose alone would do next to nothing to impact these fields, so to address rampant economic inequality corporate scholars will need to eschew the academic silo and reach across disciplines to identify more effective policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Argumenta Oeconomica Cracoviensia is the property of Cracow University of Economics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the impact of the globalization process on individual life courses and employment careers in modern societies from an international comparative perspective. Empirical results are summarized from the GLOBALIFE research project (Life Courses in the Globalization Process), which studied the effects of globalization on life courses for the first time. As the results demonstrate, the globalization process has had diverse effects on different phases of the life course. Qualified men in their mid-careers are broadly protected from the effects of globalization, while young adults are the losers of the globalization process. We also find that educational and class characteristics determine the extent to which an individual faces increasing labour market risks. Under globalization, these effects have intensified. The results of the GLOBALIFE project thus indicate that globalization triggers a strengthening of existing social inequality structures. Another central finding is that globalization has not led to the same outcome across various modern societies. Globalization appears to be distinctly filtered by deeply embedded national institutions. These 'institutional packages' entail diverse strategies of labour market flexibilization which themselves differentially shape patterns of social inequality in modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]