Global Mobility of Talent from a Perspective of New Industrial Policy: Open Migration Chains and Diaspora Networks

economic development, diaspora networks, search networks, serendipity

Ratcheting labor standards : regulation for continuous improvement in the global workplace

Ratcheting Labor Standards (RLS) is a regulatory alternative that aims to improve the social performance of firms in the global economy. Under RLS, firms disclose to a certified monitor, information on their social performance, minimally including working conditions, hours, and wages. The monitors rank firms on the basis of their current social performance, and their rates of improvement, and make these rankings, and the methods on which they are based, accessible to the public. This process, it is argued, encourages leading firms to strive towards superior social practices. Competition among firms, and monitors will help establish two kinds of standards:"best practices"defined by the most advanced firms, and"rates of improvement", shown to be feasible at various levels of development. Both continually"ratchet"upward as the best practices get better still, and firms find ways to accelerate improvement, in a race to the top. These, and other RLS mechanisms, would create incentives for firms to dedicate a portion of the ingenuity, and resources now devoted to product development to the continuous improvement of labor practices.Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Labor Standards,Children and Youth,Work&Working Conditions

A Response to the Video

Let me preface my remarks by informing you that I am not a lawyer. That means that there are things I don\u27t get and things that I\u27ll say that you may not grasp immediately, because there are certain assumptions we don\u27t share. To illustrate that, let me just tell you, I don\u27t even get lawyer jokes. For example, when I saw the movie So Goes A Nation, and Sam Sue says, Law schools teach basic skills, I didn\u27t realize that was a joke until you all laughed at it. So there are many subtleties of this sort that escape me. And absent experience and some deeper form of spontaneous communion, and in blatant disregard for the most elementary lessons of community organizing, instead of connecting my own non-existent experience to the film, I\u27m just going to modestly propose a strategy for the reform of legal services – in connection with these community-based initiatives. What else could I do in total ignorance

Trade agreements, regulatory sovereignty and democratic legitimacy

Governments increasingly are seeking to use bilateral and regional trade agreements to reduce the cost-increasing effects of differences in product market regulation. They also pursue regulatory cooperation independent of trade agreements. It is important to understand what is being done through bilateral or plurilateral mechanisms to address regulatory differences, and to identify what, if any, role trade agreements can play in supporting international regulatory cooperation. This paper reflects on experience to date in regulatory cooperation and the provisions of recent trade agreements involving advanced economies that have included regulatory cooperation. We argue for a re-thinking by trade officials of the modalities and design of trade negotiations and the incorporation of institutional mechanisms that draw on insights of experimentalist governance approaches to enhance the scope for international regulatory cooperation

Open Plurilateral Agreements, Global Spillovers and the Multilateral Trading System. Bertelsmann Stiftung Working Paper 03/2020.

Problems involving regulatory design and cooperation to respond to climate change, the rise of the digital econ- omy and managing industrial policy conflicts call for cooperation to identify good practice and balancing the achievement of noneconomic objectives against competitive spillovers. Contrary to arguments that small group cooperation is second best in a world where consensus is not obtainable, open plurilateral agreements (OPAs) can be a first-best response to international collective action problems as it does not require all WTO members to participate or for the package deals that characterize trade negotiations. Sustaining an open, rules-based multilat- eral trading system calls for greater use of OPAs. The prospects for this would be enhanced if the trade policy community would build bridges to other organizations and epistemic communities and agree to a code of conduct for OPAs to ensure they support the open multilateral trade regime

Fixing the Climate: Charles Sabel in Conversation with Filippo Barbera

In this interview with Filippo Barbera, Charles F. Sabel discusses his latest book, Fixing the Climate (Princeton University Press, 2022, with D.G. Victor), that dramatically reorients our thinking about the climate crisis. It provides a road map to institutional design oriented around concrete problem-solving that can finally lead to self-sustaining reductions in emissions that years of global diplomacy have failed to deliver. The discussion touches upon a number of key issues of general interest for social scientists: global governance; decisions under uncertainty and risk; pragmatic solutions to wicked problems; technological solutions and innovation

Trade Agreements, Regulatory Sovereignty and Democratic Legitimacy

Governments increasingly are seeking to use bilateral and regional trade agreements to reduce the cost-increasing effects of differences in product market regulation. They also pursue regulatory cooperation independent of trade agreements. It is important to understand what is being done through bilateral or plurilateral mechanisms to address regulatory differences, and to identify what, if any, role trade agreements can play in supporting international regulatory cooperation. This paper reflects on experience to date in regulatory cooperation and the provisions of recent trade agreements involving advanced economies that have included regulatory cooperation. We argue for a re-thinking by trade officials of the modalities and design of trade negotiations and the incorporation of institutional mechanisms that draw on insights of experimentalist governance approaches to enhance the scope for international regulatory cooperation

Building a Good Jobs Economy

Conventional models are failing throughout the world. In the developed world, the welfare state-compensation model has been in retrenchment for some time, and the drawbacks of the neoliberal conception that has superseded it are increasingly evident. Yet there is no compelling alternative on offer. In the developing world, the conventional, tried-and-tested model of industrialization has run out of steam. In both sets of societies a combination of technological and economic forces (in particular, globalization) is creating or exacerbating productive/technological dualism, with a segment of advanced production in metropolitan areas that thrives on the uncertainty generated by the knowledge economy co-existing with a mass of relatively less productive activities and communities that neither contributes to nor benefits from innovation. The sizes of these two sectors and the trajectories leading into them may vary, but otherwise the nature of the underlying problem seems to have converged in the developed and developing worlds