The book focuses on Indonesia's most pressing labor market challenges and associated policy options to achieve higher and more inclusive economic growth. The challenges consist of creating jobs for and the skills in a youthful and increasingly better educated workforce, and raising the productivity of less-educated workers to meet the demands of the digital age. The book deals with a range of interrelated topics---the changing supply and demand for labor in relation to the shift of workers out of agriculture; urbanization and the growth of megacities; raising the quality of schooling for new jobs in the digital economy; and labor market policies to improve both labor standards and productivity.

Economic pressure, as well as transnational and domestic corporate policies, has placed labor law under severe stress. National responses are so deeply embedded in institutions reflecting local traditions that meaningful comparison is daunting. This bo

Democratization in the developing and postcommunist world has yielded limited gains for labor. Explanations for this phenomenon have focused on the effect of economic crisis and globalization on the capacities of unions to become influential political actors and to secure policies that benefit their members. In contrast, the contributors to Working through the Past highlight the critical role that authoritarian legacies play in shaping labor politics in new democracies, providing the first cross-regional analysis of the impact of authoritarianism on labor, focusing on East and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Legacies from the predemocratic era shape labor’s present in ways that both limit and enhance organized labor’s power in new democracies. Assessing the comparative impact on a variety of outcomes relevant to labor in widely divergent settings, this volume argues that political legacies provide new insights into why labor movements in some countries have confronted the challenges of neoliberal globalization better than others.

November 1996 Do the forces that regional integration arrangements set up encourage or discourage a trend toward globally freer trade? We don't know yet. The literature on regionalism versus multilateralism is growing as economists and political scientists grapple with the question of whether regional integration arrangements are good or bad for the multilateral system. Are regional integration arrangements building blocks or stumbling blocks, in Jagdish Bhagwati's phrase, or stepping stones toward multilateralism? As economists worry about the ability of the World Trade Organization to maintain the GATT's unsteady yet distinct momentum toward liberalism, and as they contemplate the emergence of world-scale regional integration arrangements (the EU, NAFTA, FTAA, APEC, and, possibly, TAFTA), the question has never been more pressing. Winters switches the focus from the immediate consequences of regionalism for the economic welfare of the integrating partners to the question of whether it sets up forces that encourage or discourage evolution toward globally freer trade. The answer is, We don't know yet. One can build models that suggest either conclusion, but these models are still so abstract that they should be viewed as parables rather than sources of testable predictions. Winters offers conclusions about research strategy as well as about the world we live in. Among the conclusions he reaches: * Since we value multilateralism, we had better work out what it means and, if it means different things to different people, make sure to identify the sense in which we are using the term. * Sector-specific lobbies are a danger if regionalism is permitted because they tend to stop blocs from moving all the way to global free trade. In the presence of lobbies, trade diversion is good politics even if it is bad economics. * Regionalism's direct effect on multilateralism is important, but possibly more so is the indirect effect it has by changing the ways in which groups of countries interact and respond to shocks in the world economy. * Regionalism, by allowing stronger internalization of the gains from trade liberalization, seems likely to facilitate freer trade when it is initially highly restricted. * The possibility of regionalism probably increases the risks of catastrophe in the trading system. The insurance incentives for joining regional arrangements and the existence of shiftable externalities both lead to such a conclusion. So too does the view that regionalism is a means to bring trade partners to the multilateral negotiating table because it is essentially coercive. Using regionalism for this purpose may have been an effective strategy, but it is also risky. This paper - a product of the International Trade Division, International Economics Department - was prepared for a conference on regional integration sponsored by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, La Coru-a, Spain, April 26-27, 1996, and will appear in the conference proceedings.

Stock markets, banks and economic growth: a reasonable extreme bounds analysis (Discussion paper, 99/4)

November 1996 The accumulation of knowledge affects trade performance and competitiveness, but trade also (through imports) affects the accumulation of knowledge. Padoan examines the properties of a dynamic disequilibrium model focused on trade specialization and the accumulation of knowledge. He uses a sector breakdown (four export and two import sectors) following Pavitt's (1984) taxonomy, which is especially appropriate for empirically analyzing the relationship between innovation activities and production and export performance. Steady-state analysis shows that: * Under perfectly balanced growth (no change in trade specialization and a uniform growth of knowledge), international diffusion of knowledge is irrelevant for growth. * Under unbalanced growth (with changes in the structure of specialization), the process of structural change may be enhanced by the effects on the domestic accumulation of knowledge of domestic spillover, as innovation activities in one sector generate positive externalities on the rest of the economy. The growth of foreign knowledge has an ambivalent effect on domestic performance because it is both a complement to, and a substitute for, domestic knowledge. Whenever these two effects do not perfectly match, the diffusion of international knowledge is associated with unbalanced growth. Imports of knowledge-intensive goods may not lead to higher growth unless there is sufficiently strong trade performance in the knowledge-intensive sectors (that is, there are thresholds in expansion of market share). This result, whose implications for developing countries is relevant, is not usually reported in the literature in which greater accumulation of foreign knowledge unambiguously leads to higher growth in the country that imports technology through trade. Unbalanced growth is also associated with output catching up. Technological catching up is necessary but not sufficient for balanced growth. Parameter estimates were obtained for France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Results appear to be consistent with theoretical expectations about the importance of price and nonprice determinants of trade performance in the four sectors. Results also seem to be generally consistent with the distribution of revealed comparative advantages in the sense that the country cases exhibit high and significant price and knowledge elasticities and high adjustment speeds - suggesting a good capacity to deliver in sectors with revealed comparative advantage. Simulation exercises confirm steady-state results on the relevance of country differences in trade specialization and in the domestic accumulation of knowledge as they affect growth. They also clarify the relationship between growth and changes in the structure of trade specialization. This paper - a product of the International Trade Division, International Economics Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to assess the role of technology diffusion in economic development.