Showing papers by "Gary S. Fields published in 1995"

Trade and Labour Standards: A Review of the Issues

Abstract: Excerpt] This is a paper by a labour economist for trade specialists. It is written at a time of hope tempered by fear. On the trade side, the hope is that the new World Trade Organisation will stimulate a better trading environment for all countries. On the labour side, the hope is that labour standards can continually be improved for most if not all of the world's working people. But there are also fears. One fear is that these goals may be difficult to achieve simultaneously. Another is that they may be undone by various pressures, including issues left unresolved in the Uruguay Round of the GATT. Trade and labour market policies are continuously being discussed and reformulated. Strangely enough, much of this debate takes place in the absence of clearly-articulated goals. The reasons, it would seem, are twofold. On the one hand, for some analysts, the goals (e.g. freer trade, workers' rights) are held to be self-evident. On the other hand, the goals are themselves sometimes hard to pinpoint. When does "free trade" give way to "fair trade"? When does the pursuit of one labour standard (e.g. free collective bargaining) take precedence over another (e.g. full employment)?

Income Distribution in Developing Economies: Conceptual, Data, and Policy Issues in Broad-Based Growth

Abstract: Excerpt] The aim of economic development is to raise the standard of living of a country's people, especially its poor. Economic growth, particularly when broadly based, is a means to that end. 'Underdevelopment' can be defined as a state of severely constrained choices. When one is choosing from among an undesirable set of alternatives, the outcome will itself be undesirable. Standards of living will be low. If standards of living are to be improved, people must have a better set of alternatives from which to choose. 'Economic development' is the process by which the constraints on choices are relaxed. Based on ample evidence from microeconomic studies (see, for instance, the Nobel Prize winning research of T. W. Schultz 1980), we may be confident that when poor people in the developing world have better options from which to choose, the choices they make will lead them to enjoy better outcomes, hence raising standards of living. Accordingly, the task of economic development is to enhance the alternatives from which to choose, that is, the 'choice set'. 'Broad-based growth' means that the choice set is improved for all economic strata. There is good reason to expect that the upper and middle classes have many mechanisms at their disposal for benefiting from the growth process. These groups gain when economic growth takes place. It is less certain whether the poor are also reached by growth.