This paper traces the evolution of employment relations in the U.S. auto industry over the post World War II period with particular emphasis on recent developments. There is a strong movement toward growing variation in employment relations within both the assembly and parts sectors of the auto industry. Variation appears both through the spread of more contingent compensation and team systems of work organization. There is also wide variety across plants and industry segments in basic employment systems including low wage, human resource, Japanese-oriented, and joint team-based approaches. Declining unionization is a particularly strong influence in the parts sector although nonunion operations have now spread to the assembly sector. While these trends are well illustrated by developments in the auto industry, they are trends common to other parts of the U.S. economy.

This paper describes the new approaches the German automobile industry has developed during the last four years. It deals with product strategy, production concepts, work organization, industrial relations and technology. In the automobile industry, team concepts and groupwork have been the most important innovations in increasing efficiency. There are two fundamentally different approaches to team work The concept of ‘structurally conservative groupwork’ is a more or less modernized version of Taylorism. The job descriptions of production workers remain narrow, there is not much work autonomy and no reprofessionalization. By contrast, ‘structurally innovative groupwork’ builds on the specific assets of the German industrial order: the tradition of craft work (Facharbeiter), the strong focus on qualified, self-directed work, and the consensus orientation in the field of industrial relations.

Since the late 1980s there have been significant problems in the Korean auto industry related to employment relations. This paper focusses on the experience of three companies: Hyundai, Daewoo and Kia, which have pursued somewhat different strategies in industrial relations and human resource management. Hyundai, which is the largest auto producer, has experienced major labour disputes almost every year since 1987, but has reached an accommodation with its union in the past couple of years. Daewoo and Kia have both faced militant union leadership since the early 1990s. Kia’s management was rather indecisive, but Daewoo was more decisive and industrial relations appear to have stabilised. However, major industrial conflicts at the end of 1996, following the government’s attempt to reform labour laws, and the formation of a new independent peak union council, indicate that industrial relations in the Korean auto industry are likely to remain unsettled for some time.

This article examines the process of financial deregulation in Australia during the decade when Australia’s financial system changed from a highly regulated system to a system with few quantitative or qualitative controls, a freely floating exchange rate and a deficit fully financed by the market. While existing accounts have tended to focus on a single explanatory variable (such as an ideological shift or economic pressures), this article argues that policy outcomes were the result of a more complex interaction of ideology, economic forces, institutional structures and political interests. In analyzing the effect of these significant influences, the article provides a more complete picture of the deregulatory process and places the Wallis Report in context.

The Wallis Report, adopted by the Government in September of this year, contained a wide-ranging set of reforms that are likely to alter significantly the style and structure of financial regulation in Australia. This survey offers some reflections on the Wallis Report, its key recommendations and the thinking underlying them.

The Committee saw market failure as the primary rationale for regulation. Markets fail to produce efficient, competitive outcomes for one or more of the following reasons: anti-competitive behaviour; market misconduct; information asymmetry; and systemic instability.

The Committee’s recommended reforms were designed to create a regulatory structure that matched the four motives for regulation. This will create a regulatory structure based on regulatory functions rather than institutions. The new structure should be more efficient, less duplicative and better able to cope with the regulatory pressures that are likely to emerge in coming years from on-going technological innovation.

The Wallis Report is a substantial document with many useful insights into the workings of the financial system and its interactions with the regulatory and deregulatory process. This article provides a brief review of the Wallis Report. It argues that the Report could have been improved by first, including a more sophisticated evaluation of prior deregulatory experience, second, providing a more thorough explanation of how its recommendations will work in the areas of systemic stability and depositor protection, and third, including recommendations for a formal and rigorous monitoring of he outcomes of the recommended legislative changes.

The paper provides an assessment of the recommendations of the Financial System Inquiry and the Government’s reform proposals relating to the regulatory structure, financial safety and the mega-prudential regulator, systemic stability, and competition policy in the financial sector. It is argued that key reform proposals are based on explicit or implicit assumptions relating to the workings of financial markets and institutions. The Report fails to test those assumptions against contemporary and prospective circumstances to determine the practical worth of the recommendations.