The political economy of skills and inequality
The political economy of skills and inequality
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技能与不平等的政治经济学
DOI：
10.1093/ser/mwu013
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发表时间：
2014
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Torben Iversen (Eds.)
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Busemeyer;Marius R.;Torben Iversen (Eds.)
社会经济不平等加剧是发达工业民主国家的普遍趋势，其原因和后果仍鲜为人知。当然，最近的经济危机加剧了这一趋势，特别是在受危机影响最严重的国家，但这种增长早在1980年代就开始了，甚至更早。此外，这一趋势不能简单地用回归市场来解释，因为现有的福利国家没有大规模削减。经济学中一个非常突出的解释是，新技术将需求从低技能工人转移到高学历工人，结果是拉近了收入分配。然而，必须将需求的这些转变与技能供应的转变进行比较。在戈尔丁和卡茨2010年出版的颇具影响力的《教育与技术之间的竞赛》一书中，他们以美国为例，对这种关系进行了长期的实证评估。他们的结果很能说明问题。虽然20世纪80年代后以技能为导向的技术变革的速度与之前20年基本相同，但受过大学教育的人数量的增长明显放缓。因此，导致不平等加剧的主要因素是技能供应的减速，而不是需求的加速。戈尔丁和卡茨驳斥了美国已经达到教育水平上限的观点，他们引用了其他先进民主国家在扩大教育机会方面取得的成功，远远超出了美国的水平。同时，它们没有提供比较分析，它们严格地停留在经济供求框架内，该框架主导了有关不平等的经济文献。本期特刊的目的是通过汇集关于比较政治经济学和经济社会学领域中不平等的原因和后果的前沿研究，超越这种狭隘的经济视角，并使其“背景”化。这些贡献通过几种方式做到了这一点。首先，他们记录了技能供应变化速度的差异，以及这些差异对工资分配的影响。这至少在一定程度上解释了自20世纪80年代以来收入不平等加剧的跨国差异。第二，这些资料解释了社会经济机构的作用，特别是技能形成和集体谈判，影响了技能供应的数量和质量，以及对熟练工人的需求。通过这样做，
Rising socio-economic inequality is a common trend across advanced industrial democracies and its causes and consequences are still poorly understood. Certainly, the recent economic crisis has exacerbated the trend, in particular in countries most affected by the crisis, but the increase set in much earlier in the 1980s and even before. Furthermore, the trend cannot simply be explained by a return to markets because there has not been large-scale retrenchment of established welfare states.A very prominent explanation in economics is that new technology shifts the demand away from low-skilled and towards high-educated workers, stretching the income distribution as a result. Yet, these shifts in the demand have to be compared with shifts in the supply of skills. In the influential 2010 book by Goldin and Katz on ‘The Race between Education and Technology’, they estimate this relationship empirically over long periods of time in the case of the USA. Their results are revealing. While the rate of skill-biased technological change after 1980s was virtually identical to the previous two decades, the rise in the supply of college educated slowed markedly. Decelerating supply of skills, not accelerating demand, is therefore the main factor behind the rise in inequality. Goldin and Katz reject the notion that the USA has reached an upper limit for educational attainment, and they cite the success of other advanced democracies in expanding educational opportunities well beyond the levels in the USA. At the same time they do not offer a comparative analysis, and they stay strictly within the economic supply–demand framework that dominates the economic literature on inequality. The purpose of this special issue is to move beyond and ‘contextualize’this narrow economic perspective by bringing together cutting-edge research on the causes and consequences of inequality in the fields of comparative political economy and economic sociology. The contributions do so in several ways. First, they document differences in the rate of change in the supply of skills, and the effect these differences have on the wage distribution. This helps account for at least some of the cross-national variance in the rise of income inequality since the 1980s. Second, the contributions explain the role of socio-economic institutions, in particular skill formation and collective bargaining, influencing the quantity and quality of skill supply, as well as the demand for skilled workers. By doing so,