Poor economic performance and the Bougainville mine closure have focused attention in PNG on the appropriate stabilization package and micro policies necessary to improve the country’s economic prospects. A package of structural adjustment “reforms”, strongly supported by the IMF and World Bank, have been introduced. This paper examines the applicability and desireability of implementing these “reforms”. Our paper suggests that PNG might profitably explore some alternative development options to the ones currently in vogue.

The Green Paper makes the fundamental point that rapid economic growth of around 4 to 5 percent a year is necessary to substantially reduce unemployment, but even 5 percent growth will not greatly reduce the numbers of long-term unemployed. Policies targeted specifically at this group are also necessary. Its analysis of the policies conducive to rapid economic growth and its arguments that things like more rapid productivity growth and reductions in the participation rate have little effect on unemployment in the medium to long run are supported by simulations of the Murphy model which assumes the results that the Green Paper argues that it demonstrates. On the other hand, the Green Paper is rich in policy suggestions to reduce long—term unemployment and to improve the working of the labour market. The Job Compact is central but improvements to social security and education and training are also important.

Sport has ceased to be an amateur pursuit: it has become a form of employment and subject to many of the legalities and insititutions encompassing employment relations — including unions. This ipaper traces the development of sporting associations, identifies the range of such associations, examines problems which are peculiar to employment in the ‘sports industry’ and future prospects for unions in that industry.

This paper examines recent attempts to quantify the effects of some major microeconomic reforms on the Australian economy. These micro reforms improve competitiveness. Such measures, however, would apparently do little to raise the share of the manufacturing sector in national product despite induced improvements in competitiveness. The relationship between micro reform and the balance of payments is explored. Some attempts to measure the impact of specific micro reform on the environment are also analysed.

In a purely economic sense, unemployment in the Australian community is extremely costly. This article analyses evidence from the 1994 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey (NATSIS) to illustrate that social costs of unemployment are potentially very large. The unemployed, especially the long-term unemployed, fared worse than the employed on a range of social indicators. For example, among urban unemployed, the long-term unemployed: are more likely to have been arrested, are more likely to be taken from natural family, are less likely to have voted in a recent election, have lower participation rates in voluntary work, are less likely to be motivated and are more likely to have a long-term health problem. The unprecedented range of social indicators in the NATSIS means that the analysis provides an insight into the likely social costs of unemployment in the population at large, not just those for the Indigenous population.

About USD7 trillion of quantitative easing funds has flooded emerging markets since 2008. These funds, created to stimulate a recovery in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and to stabilise financial markets, ended up mostly as emerging markets’ corporate bonds and loans (often after being leveraged into many multiples of their original value). Not for the first time, emerging markets became the financial markets of last resort. These funds were then either mainly invested (Asia) or used (as in Latin America and South Africa) for almost anything except for creating additional productive capacities. Enquiries into these issues, especially how corporations financed their investment, were subjects that fascinated economist Ajit Singh. He was the first to find out that corporations in emerging markets relied much more on external finance than those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (where retained profits played a major role). The implication was that they were likely to be more susceptible to the vicissitudes of financial markets, and these have become even more weird since quantitative easing, as Northern ‘investors’, in search for elusive yields, have been happy to take on ever higher risks, leverage and illiquidity in the South. This is a key difference between current global financial fragilities and those at the onset of the current global financial crisis in 2007. The stakes for emerging economies and international financial markets could scarcely be higher, but unfortunately these huge new challenges occur at the worst possible time, as our social imagination has seldom been so barren.

There have been a number of labour market programs that have attempted to increase rates of employment of Indigenous Australians by influencing job search behaviour. This paper provides the first ever baseline of data on the job search behaviour of Indigenous job seekers and how it compares to the job search of non-Indigenous job seekers. Clear differences between the job search behaviours of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are apparent. Indigenous Australians rely disproportionately on friends and relatives as a source of information about jobs, although their networks tend to have less employed members, and therefore are less effective than non-Indigenous networks in securing employment. Non-Indigenous job seekers are also more likely to use more proactive search methods than are Indigenous job seekers.

This paper defines job sharing and explores its potential benefits. An overview of its origins and growth in Australia and overseas is followed by discussion of management issues. Organisational issues concern aspects of planning, implementation and operation. Issues for job sharers include finding an appropriate job share partner, maintenance of the job sharing relationship, protection of voluntary participation and preservation of pro rata benefits and other working conditions. A process for facilitating effective liaison between management, job sharers and trade unions is proposed. Job sharing is uncommon in Australia but may assist workers to balance work and family responsibilities or pursue interests outside work while avoiding many disadvantages of precarious work. For employers, it may facilitate retention of valued staff, reduce turnover, enhance recruiting or reduce staff costs. These propositions have not been rigorously tested, however, and avenues for future research are therefore explored.

There is evidence that seaweed production can involve a variety of physical risks, but there has been little study of how wider contextual factors – such as enterprise size, economic and business relations, and forms of employment arrangements – may affect workers’ safety. This study explores the impact of such aspects on workers’ experiences of occupational safety and health (OSH) risks and their management in the developing seaweed industry, in North West Europe. Based on qualitative findings from a survey and discussions with owners/managers, workers and stakeholders in the industry, the study identified a number of issues relating to OSH in seaweed production. These include the predominance of micro small enterprises, the presence of significant risks to health and safety and limitations in the capacity of owners/managers to address them, as well as structural and economic factors in the sector that promote precarious work, and the low visibility and inaccessibility of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) to both public and private regulations. The paper discusses experiences of these issues in the emergent industry and relates them to the wider literature about work health and safety in micro and small firms and precarious and non-standard forms of work, typically found in agriculture and food production. Findings point to the need for better orchestration of public and private regulatory influences and further research to determine if strategies that are seen as successful in other sectors could be transferred to the emergent European seaweed industry.

This article critically challenges the findings and assumptions of mainstream job polarisation literature. Based on the European Working Conditions Survey data and on the Job Demand-Control model, which allows for capturing the organisational dimension of jobs, we examine the patterns and evolution of occupations in 22 European countries from 2005 to 2015. Instead of pervasive job polarisation, we observe a near-pervasive trend of upgrading job quality, suggesting that job polarisation may be caused by the undervaluation/devaluation of jobs low in the occupational hierarchy – not by computerisation-driven changes in work tasks. Indeed, only the former can explain the decrease in the number of low-quality jobs while the number of low-paid jobs increases. After documenting the relevance of firm-level organisational choices, we suggest that counteracting job polarisation requires, beyond meso-level collective bargaining, a public intervention that promotes participatory decision-making in firms.

Most truck drivers experience economic pressure in the form of low pay rates, no pay for non-driving work time, and long work hours. Unpaid working time, leading to low effective pay rates, encourages drivers to work excessive hours to pursue target earnings, which leads to fatigue and working time violations, and ultimately raises crash rates. This paper explores the complex relationship between regulatory violations, pay incentives, and crashes, to determine the effects of economic forces on carrier safety. We use data from 13,904 intrastate trucking companies in the United States, as well as median hourly truck driver wages from data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We find that controlling for observed regulatory violations (hours of service, unsafe driving, and substance abuse), at the mean, 1% higher driver wages are associated with 1.04% fewer crashes. Stated differently, a 10% wage increase would be 5 times as effective as a 10% reduction in ‘unsafe driving’ or 2.5 times as effective as a 10% reduction in ‘driver fitness’ violations. This unit elasticity between driver pay and crashes suggests that higher compensation will bring direct and commensurate worker and public safety benefits. Every unit in higher pay, at the mean, will lead to a corresponding unit improvement in safety. Our findings suggest that the most effective way for regulators to pursue their mission to reduce crashes, fatal or otherwise, would be to collect firm-level data on truck driver compensation and allow their methodology to follow sound science.

We are now close to reaching what climate scientists advise is a ‘tipping point’ when the injuries we have visited on the planet will become self-reinforcing and produce an ecosystem that is alien to human life. The mal-distribution of consumption within and between nations is a major reason why there is little agreement on appropriate remedial action. Ensuring planetary survival while reducing inequity is made the more difficult, because the richest one-seventh of the world’s population has already reached consumption levels beyond the capacity of the planetary ecosystem to accommodate it.

Proponents of voluntary exchange in labour markets place great reliance on the contract of employment as an appropriate vehicle for the practical implementation of their exchange model. This paper argues a contrary view and suggests that the contract of employment may not be an appropriate vehicle for the voluntary exchange of labour.

The absence of institutionalised childcare and education during the lockdowns, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, put parents who worked from home in a stressful situation in which they had to combine the roles of teacher, parent and employee. This study aims to analyse how the closure of kindergartens and schools during the March–May 2020 lockdown in Slovenia changed the reported allocation of time, and perceived emotional exhaustion of parents working from home, compared to nonparents. We also focus on the differences in the impacts of lockdown between genders, status of family-provision and employment sectors of parents. Using data from a survey carried out on cohabiting and married individuals in Slovenia and applying a difference-in-difference estimator, we find that parents incurred a significant increase in their unpaid work burden, reductions in time devoted to paid work and leisure and suffered an increase in emotional exhaustion. Namely, Slovenian parents reported roughly 2 h less of paid and 4 h more of unpaid work per day during the lockdown in comparison to nonparents. The analysis also demonstrates that females performed more unpaid work and enjoyed less leisure before the lockdown, but the lockdown adjustment did not further increase gender inequality.

Spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), there has been a rethinking of macroeconomic policies, in particular with regard to targeting inflation at a very low level in the wake of 2008–2009 global economic crisis. We provide a content analysis of the IMF Staff Reports on Article IV consultation of 12 Asian developing countries during the period 2009–2010 in order to see whether that rethinking has been reflected in the IMF’s advice. The findings of this study reveal that the IMF continues with its prescription of achieving low inflationary environment irrespective of country-specific circumstances.

The concept of Smart Specialisation (S3) as a foundation of regional development has spread far beyond the European Union. In Australia, S3 appeared first in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, but was applied in its most developed form in the Gippsland region of Victoria. Despite its growing influence, S3 has come in for criticism. In this article, we look at the way that the Foundational Economy (FE) and the related concept of Deep Place (DP) analysis have been promoted as potential answers to these limitations. I question how far FE and DP should be seen as an extension of or an alternative to S3. I look to more extensive approaches that have been put forward.