Introduction

Proponents of a “race to the bottom” argument (Chan 2003) would suggest that production goes where wages are lowest. This would certainly explain the growth of apparel exports in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Myanmar. But that argument alone cannot explain why China remains the largest apparel exporter in the world while its wages are four times higher than in Bangladesh. And those who suggest that production goes where logistics are the most efficient and economies of scale are the greatest (as in China) cannot explain why Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing major apparel exporters in the world, or why Honduras is the largest Latin American exporter. In this chapter, I argue that buyers in apparel GPNs want not only to keep costs low but also to reduce the likelihood of supply chain disruption caused by worker organization and mobilization by controlling labour. Indeed, the ten top apparel exporters in the world today reflect three models of labour control. These encompass authoritarian state labour control regimes (LCRs), despotic market labour control regimes and repressive employer labour control regimes.

In the case of state LCRs, labour is controlled by a system of legal and extra-legal mechanisms designed to prevent or curtail independent worker organization and collective action. Extreme examples of such authoritarian state LCRs include China and Vietnam. In despotic market LCRs, unfavourable labour market conditions discipline labour; strong worker organizing is curtailed because workers are afraid that active participation in a union may result in job loss and prolonged unemployment or underemployment. Low-income countries with very weak labour markets, such as Bangladesh and Indonesia, exemplify despotic market LCRs. Finally, employer LCRs in their most extreme form include highly repressive employer actions against workers, including the systematic and broad use of violence or the threat of the use of violence. Examples of repressive employer LCRs can be seen in Honduras and El Salvador.

These three ideal-typical forms of control are not mutually exclusive or static; all countries have had elements of each system and all countries go through changes over the course of their histories. Bangladesh has a despotic market labour control regime, but workers in Bangladesh have also been killed while organizing collective action.

Introduction

Writing in 2021, the relationship between trade and labour has become especially apparent. An immediate example is the post-Brexit EU– UK trade arrangement, which brought this relationship to the fore through concerns to ensure that the United Kingdom did not deviate in ways that might give it a competitive trade advantage over the European Union by not maintaining sufficiently high labour standards. Another example is the claims of the Trump and Biden administrations in the United States to put the American worker at the centre of US trade policy. But these issues have always been present, beyond the headlines, in the deep history of international trade policy (see Smith et al. 2021).

Trade, and the range of multi-, bi-and unilateral agreements between states that aim to deepen economic relationships, can be understood as instruments designed to enlarge spaces for the integration of economic life that fundamentally shape work and employment. Free trade agreements (FTAs) are an integral contemporary mechanism by which deepening trade integration occurs, and, more broadly, reconfigure spaces for the accumulation of capital, including through the production and exchange of goods across jurisdictions. In so doing, they are powerful forces in the reconfiguration of workplace and employment practices, and in reshaping labour regimes.

Conventionally, trade liberalization has been seen as “bad” for labour, a position that has structured leftist politics on FTAs for many years, often leading to oppositional positions. Indeed, one explanation for the rise of labour provisions, such as the European Union's trade and sustainable devel-opment (TSD) chapters in its recent FTAs, is that trade governance was seeking to ameliorate some of the worst consequences of trade integration for workers by requiring trade partners to align with international labour standards (see Smith et al. 2021). Others note the role of trade integration in increasing aggregate demand for labour and the numbers of workers in employment, especially in global value chain trade (e.g. World Bank 2020). But a perspective starting with global production networks would always caution that any such sweeping assessments are nuanced by the sectoral and production network-specific consequences of trade integration, and their differential impacts on various groups of workers – requiring, essentially, that we acknowledge the uneven socio-economic distributional consequences of trade and GPN integration.

Introduction

Debates about labour regimes in global production have become an important field for addressing what Thompson and Newsome (2004: 133) call the connectivity problem. This is the question of how labour process dynamics at the point of production connect to the broader political economy (see also Taylor et al. 2015: 15). In response to this question, among others, labour geographers, and GPN scholars in particular, have drawn upon and developed the concept of the local labour control regime (Jonas 1996; see also Chapter 4 by Peck). Often with reference to detailed case studies, they show how national and regional state policies, interwoven with global firm dynamics, constitute specific local social practices and institutions that shape working and living conditions (Pattenden 2016; Baglioni 2018; Smith et al. 2018). They have developed multi-scalar approaches, which see (local) labour regimes as being “continuously reproduced and/or transformed by forces … operating at a variety of scales” (Jonas 1996: 329).

In this chapter, I want to follow and deepen this multi-scalar orientation but in a slightly different way. Instead of using specific case studies, I want to propose a heuristic scheme that seems helpful for grasping the central logics and dynamics in contemporary global production – or, as I call it, glocal production. The term “glocalization” describes a seemingly contradictory dynamic of contemporary capitalism: that the socio-spatial fragmentation and deregulation of working and living standards, namely their downscaling, is the corollary of an upscaled, generalized logic of competitive capitalist accumulation (Swyngedouw 1997). The national scale continues to be highly relevant but it loses its former dominant position. In production, the glocal logic applies in the way that the multi-scalar fragmentation of labour processes is the basis of spatial dispersion and upscaled profit-led governance. The consequences are far-reaching, in terms of intensified socio-spatial competition between workers and with regard to the general transformation of labour's socio-political representation in the political economy and society.

In this chapter, I draw on Michael Burawoy's work on factory regimes to bring the fragmentation/transnationalization logic of production and its importance for workers into view. I distinguish heuristically between despotic and hegemonic labour regimes, and I understand current glocal production as reflective of their dynamics and rescaling. Burawoy's a priori political understanding of the labour process is very important for the analysis.

Introduction: Why Labour Regimes?

Capitalism's innate tendency to endless competitive accumulation and global expansion raises the question of where and how exploitation occurs. We argue here that exploitation is the primary starting point to understand the labour performed by the world's 3.5 billion workers, as well as the hundreds of millions of disguised wage labourers and unidentified homeworkers who appear to be self-employed (ILO 2018). The centrality of exploitation derives from Marx, who saw exploitation as an analytical category, not merely a normative description of poor working and living conditions. Exploitation refers to the difference in value between what workers produce and what workers are paid. This “excess” in value – surplus value – is derived from the part of labour time when workers are no longer working for their own reproduction but for the capitalist (Marx 1976 [1867]). As this process of value extraction from labour to capital is neither natural, nor homogeneous nor restricted to places and moments of paid work, its boundaries should be explored, rather than taken for granted.

In this chapter, we set out to develop the “labour regime” as a category of theory and tool of method to better undertake this endeavour. We develop labour regime analysis as a means to better understand the various ways in which exploitation manifests, occurs and intensifies. We draw on the analytical tools of historical materialism, and, like several other chapters in this volume, we counter “productivist” variants of Marxism that understand processes of capitalist exploitation as occurring exclusively within the “productive” sphere (e.g. the formal workplace). To this end, we draw on and develop debates on social reproduction and labour (e.g. Mies 1986; Bhattacharya 2017; and Mezzadri 2019) and on nature and labour (e.g. Barca 2019), by arguing that these spheres are as central to labour regimes and exploitation as the production of commodities and the circulation of capital. We start with the core assumption that production is the fundamental site of surplus value extraction, but we seek to show how the labour regimes that enable such a process necessarily straddle other spheres. In essence, there is no production without circulation, and also without the reproductive work that provides labour power, or the ecological relations that provide the matter, means and forces of production.

Introduction

Over the last few decades “east Asia” has become a global factory. The economic ascent of the eastern part of Asia was first noticed when northeast Asian economies such as South Korea and Taiwan started to follow Japan's model of export-oriented industrialization during the 1960s and became international manufacturing hubs for consumer goods by the 1980s (Amsden 1989; Wade 1990). Since the 1980s southeast Asian economies have also moved from import substitution to export-oriented industrialization. This macro-regional pattern of successive industrial development attracted international attention and led to the World Bank's 1993 report The East Asian Miracle, which looked for a pattern of economic development across both northeast and southeast Asia. Although the report was marked by a sloppy political compromise between statism and neoliberalism, and proposed market-friendly state intervention as a source of development, the World Bank got one thing right. Despite the two different names given arbitrarily by the geopolitics of colonialism and the Cold War to two subregions in the eastern part of Asia (Emmerson 1984; Holcombe 2010), there were emerging links and shared characteristics between them that were significant enough for both regions to be encompassed as “east Asia”. This chapter addresses macro-regional dynamics affecting northeast and southeast Asian economies (hereafter “east Asia”) such as the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

The rise of east Asia as a global factory, in which national, pan-regional and global production networks are central, is often attributed to its tight macro-regional integration, often described as a win-win process leading to more inclusive regional development (Asian Development Bank [ADB] 2007, 2008, 2010). This chapter examines the validity of such a claim by investigating the most ignored aspects of east Asian development, namely the quantitative and qualitative changes in the nature and form of work and employment in capitalist production networks in the region. The rise of east Asia is not only about the region becoming an international manufacturing hub. More importantly, the rise of east Asia means that the region is becoming the continent of labour, with a rapidly increasing number of workers.

Labour Regimes and Global Production: Intellectual Contexts

Huge strides have been made in recent decades in our understanding of the networked and dynamic forms of capital accumulation in the world economy. Ranging across foundational work on the new international div-ision of labour (NIDL) to more recent global production network (GPN) and global value chain (GVC) analyses, such work has enabled an enhanced understanding of the ways in which more globally integrated economies have developed and become consolidated. Until recently, however, this work has been more silent in terms of understanding both the employment and the labour consequences of these changes, and also the role that labour plays in the structuring and formulation of landscapes of accumulation. Although it is possible to diagnose a growing “awareness of the different forms of labour” enrolled into global production structures (Taylor et al. 2015: 9), alongside growing attention to social upgrading, the rights and voice of labour, and labour agency (Ramamurthy 2000; Barrientos, Gereffi & Rossi 2011; Coe 2015), we still see a tendency towards a capital-centric narrative focused on firms as the key agents and actors in global production systems.

Our approach in this collection is to recentre the analysis of global capitalism on the labour regime as the core of networked, scalar systems of economic integration and production. At its core, a labour regime signals the combination of social relations and institutions that bind capital and labour in a form of antagonistic relative stability in particular times and places. This recentring is important both analytically and politically. Analytically, it refuses to privilege any single site in a global production system but, rather, sees the labour regime as the societal framework through which capitalist accumulation at a world scale becomes possible. Politically, it positions labour at the heart of questions about how we understand and approach the global economy. By understanding and locating different forms and modes of work, labour regime analysis seeks to defetishize exploitation as a first step for building relationships of commonality between workers who are, seemingly, often disparate, including those whose labour is frequently “hidden” in informal or household economies. Labour regimes analysis exposes the multiple threads linking different workers both within systems of global production and also across workplaces, regions and countries, thereby indicating avenues for building new solidarities.

Introduction

This chapter argues for the need to investigate the temporal dimension of labour regimes in order to account more fully for the changing nature of capitalist production and related forms of labour control. To do so, the chapter revisits the concept of the dormitory labour regime and posits “time” as the principal category in the analysis of the transnational organization of production. Time, as I show below, reveals the novel forms of material and discursive control over labour as well as the extent to which these control practices are imbued within a normative gendered and sexual order. The aim of this chapter is thus to broaden the established spatial approaches to the transnationalization of production by drawing attention to the temporal analysis of labour regimes.

The concept of the dormitory labour regime was pioneered by Pun Ngai and Chris Smith (2007) in their discussion of export-oriented electronics production in post-socialist China. Against the backdrop of the well-established periodization in labour process theory, tracing the shift from Taylorism and Fordism to flexible accumulation in the “West”, Pun and Smith embed their analysis in the context of China to show the prominence of a new form of labour regime, which they call the dormitory labour regime. The regime's significance lies in showing how mass production is being restructured via a novel labour system of “work-residence” that merges workers’ productive and reproductive spaces. Although, typically, the notion of labour regimes stands for practices of labour control at the place of production (Taylor & Rioux 2018), the dormitory labour regime makes it manifest that capital's control of relations of production pivots on its direct control over the social reproduction of labour. Located in proximity to factories, dormitories combine work and residence, thus permitting transnational corporations to lengthen the workday and command almost all daily reproduction of labour. In that dormitories facilitate socialization among workers, the “work-life” compression also aims to suppress the establishing of labour communities and labour institutions that could improve working conditions and advance collective organizing. It is precisely such intensive reorganization of space via the dormitory labour regime, Pun and Smith (2007) suggest, that spearheaded China's integration into global industrial capitalism.

Introduction

Despite the remarkable empirical richness and rigour of labour regime analysis, the concept itself has remained somewhat nebulous, making it hard to grasp outside the specific context within which it is deployed. This lack of conceptual clarity is visible in the ways in which the notion of labour regime is often used interchangeably with other concepts such as local labour control regime, labour control and labour process. Conceptual difficulties are also evidenced by the tendency to mobilize multiple labour regimes to account for a specific labour process. Although most analyses proceed without a clear definition of the concept, it seems fair to say that a majority of scholars implicitly adopt a general approach defining labour regime as “the assemblage of elements that set the conditions under which people work” (Murray Li 2017: 247). But what are those elements? How should we assemble them? And how do they set the conditions under which people work?

By labour regime I understand a relatively stable set of norms, rules and practices regulating the corporeal utilization, mobilization, motivation and reproduction of labour (Taylor & Rioux 2018: 29– 46). To the extent that a labour regime encompasses these spheres, it is defined by distinct yet interrelated and overlapping forms of labour control: (a) the utilization of labour power and the attendant politics of production; (b) the mobilization of labour power and the associated politics of circulation; (c) the motivation of labour and the politics of representation; and (d) the reproduction of labour power and the related politics of social reproduction. Labour control permeates a labour regime according to its specific manifestation at different moments of the circuit of capital. To talk about labour control is, therefore, to talk about specific locus and logics of power within a wider, more encompassing concept of labour regime. Given that control is inherent to any labour regime, I consider the notion of “labour control regime” and its variants as a pleonasm. I will therefore use the term “labour regime” to avoid the tautology.

As I go on to argue, the issue of labour control highlights the embodied nature of labour regimes. Labour regimes are corporeal regimes characterized by the ways in which labouring bodies are utilized or not, mobilized or not, motivated or not, and reproduced or not.

Introduction

For feminist scholars, it is axiomatic that, to understand labour regimes, one must look beyond the workplace. Specifically, we ask how axes of social difference beyond class – gender, but also race, caste, etc. and their multiple intersections – become constructed and/or mobilized in the production process in ways that create value for capital. In their classic enquiry into the relationship between “nimble fingers” and “cheap workers”, Elson and Pearson (1981) established a feminist political economy of globalization that centred the relationship between gender subordination and capitalist exploitation. Women were the preferred workforce on the global assembly line because the labour market functioned as a “bearer of gender”, pulling women into the factory and the condition of waged employment without liberating them from the “gender ascriptive relations” that structured the domains of family and household. As Elson and Pearson noted, gender was largely neglected in early analyses of the new international division of labour (Fröbel, Heinrichs & Kreye 1978). Within a decade, however, this neglect had given way to a growing consensus that the development strategies adopted across much of Latin America and Asia were “as much female led as export led” (Joekes 1987: 81). Feminist analyses of the NIDL diagnosed the intimate connection between two processes of incorporation: that of (mostly) previously unwaged women into the formal economy, and that of developing countries into global markets for manufactures and other processed goods (Nash & Fernandez Kelly 1983; Ward 1990).

What I call in this chapter the feminist NIDL literature extends from the 1980s to the 2000s. It comprises a rich and vast body of scholarship examining the gendered dimensions of economic restructuring and the turn towards export-oriented development in Mexico (Fernández-Kelly 1983; Iglesias Prieto 1985; Sklair 1993), Central America and the Caribbean (Safa 1995; Freeman 1993), Malaysia (Ong 1987), Thailand (Mills 1999), China (Lee 1998; Pun 2005), Indonesia (Wolf 1992), and Sri Lanka (Lynch 2007; Hewamanne 2008), among others. Focused originally on factory labour, it has expanded to include women's work in global service industries, including call centres (Patel 2010), data entry (Freeman 2000) and care work (Hochschild 2000; Parrenas 2001), as well as agriculture (Carney 1988; Dolan 2001). Collectively, this scholarship asks when and why women came to dominate the labour force in these globalizing sectors, and how waged employment affects the social status and livelihood prospects of women workers, their families and their communities.

Introduction

Analyses of labour regimes have a long history in development studies and related disciplines. Much of the early work took place in the 1970s and 1980s. The focus of much of this work was on aspects of agrarian and rural labour studies, particularly involving studies analysing how capital from the colonial period onwards penetrated the countryside in Africa, Asia and Latin America through state violence, taxation and new production processes and, through this, how labour was subsumed under capital. These studies covered a wide range of fields, including the integration of peasant petty commodity producers into the capitalist economy (e.g. Bernstein 1977, 1986), plantations and indentured labour (e.g. Breman 1989), labour migration to mines from labour reservoirs (Freund 1988) and how this and the subsumption of gendered work shaped the new labour regimes (Burawoy 1976).

This chapter charts how this work within development studies, Marxist anthropology, history and economics pushed forward the study of rural labour regimes. Many contributors saw labour regimes as embedded in debates within Marxist political economy, not the least concerning agrarian-related transitions (Byres 1981; Patnaik 1976; Rey 1982 [1973]). For others, it related to other debates on the peasantry (Williams 1976). There was a strong focus on capital– labour relations or the absence of such a relationship. Through this research, new concepts were coined, applied and criticized, and peasant households were reconceptualized in a number of ways, including as petty commodity producers and as subsumed under capital. The “labour regime” concept was rarely used explicitly in these studies, but in this chapter they are looked at from a labour regime perspective, and it is shown how they were concerned with the emergence of new labour regimes under capitalism.

This chapter uses the term “labour regimes” as its core concept, in much the same manner as Michael Burawoy used “factory regimes”. The change of the terminology here, from “factory” to “labour”, indicates that capital– labour relations are not solely factory-based. Burawoy (1985: 87) defined the “factory regime” as “the overall political form of production, including both the political effects of the labour process and the political apparatuses of production”.

Introduction

In 2017 the Czech Ministry of the Interior ran a campaign with governmental and policing bodies at national, regional and municipal scales targeting “security and public order in industrial zones and their surroundings related to the increased employment of foreigners” (Ministerstvo Vnitra 2017). Undertaking press conferences and highly mediatized “raids” on worker dormitories, the campaign expressed an increasingly xenophobic atmosphere in a pre-election year in which fears about migrants took centre stage (Krčal & Naxera 2018). With rising numbers of migrant workers from eastern EU and third countries1 precariously employed in the export-oriented manufacturing sector, media headlines repeatedly depicted “foreign workers” and worker dormitories as sites of violence, criminality and social threat. Krimi-plzeň, an online, hard right but relatively widely read publication focusing on “crime reporting” in the industrial city of Pilsen, perhaps captured the pinnacle of this with its 2016 special report: “Foreigners in Pilsen from A to Z without rose-tinted glasses”, the subheading of which went on with “syphilis, alcohol, drugs, murder, dormitories, fights, scabies – and a solution nowhere to be seen” (Krimi-plzeň 2016).

It would be a mistake to simply put such abjectly violent characterization of migrant workers down to the reactionary jolts of rising right-wing currents in central and eastern Europe, a local peculiarity of “post-socialist” Europe (Dzenovska 2013). Rather, such explicitly racializing characterization of “foreigners” by state and media is also related to the social reproduction of a just-in-time migrant workforce in the Czech dormitory labour regime, which is prevalent in sectors such as electronics manufacturing, and employers’ contingent attempts to assemble and manage a socially differentiated workforce (see also Chapter 16 by Andrijasevic). The dormitory labour regime is not geared solely towards the production of commodities, but presents a terrain of struggle over the very (re)production of labouring subjects within changing local conditions and geographies of global production. As Taylor and Rioux (2018: 45) outline, “We shouldn't think of a labour regime as a singular mechanism, but rather as a series of overlapping social processes that, together, shape how workforces with specific characteristics are produced and utilised.” The (re)production and management of such “specific characteristics” encompasses historically and geographically contingent processes of gendering and racialization that hierarchically differentiate workers in ways tightly articulated with class exploitation and shaped by scale-crossing dynamics of international migration and globalized production.

Introduction

Seen from a global scale, capitalism in the twenty-first century has amplified a set of destructive trends faced by workers across the world. These trends include the increasing precaritization of labour conditions, the declining power of organized labour unions and intensified competition between workers in and among national economies. Worse still, the plight of many wage workers has converged with the marginalization of non-waged activities and livelihoods, forcing workers to make difficult choices between the Scylla of the workplace and the Charybdis of life on the streets. Although contemporary scholars continue to draw attention to possibilities for working-class revitalization, the most characteristic portrayal of contemporary labour may not be the sweatshop proletarian but the outcast pauper (Breman et al. 2019). Any future labour politics must lay bare the historical dynamic between proletarian and pauper by connecting the processes linking working-class experiences inside the hidden abode of production to another hidden abode: social reproduction.

In this chapter, we analyse the links between labour regime politics at the point of production and dynamics of social reproduction by joining insights from social reproduction theory (SRT) together with those from world-systems analysis. The SRT perspective draws attention to the ways that capital accumulation has arisen through the creation of exclusionary boundaries between the valued (i.e. remunerated) labour of proletarianized wage workers and the devalued (i.e. unremunerated) labour of working-class families and communities that produce and reproduce exploitable workers. Connecting the politics of valued and devalued labour, we argue, extends the analytic boundaries of labour studies beyond the workplace and offers insights into how organized labour can mobilize alongside broader struggles for gender, racial and social justice. Analysing labour regimes from a world-systems perspective, in turn, draws attention to the ways that exclusionary class identities and workplace politics have been shaped by global processes of proletarianization and dispossession. Specifically, the world-systems perspective highlights how the exclusionary boundaries of remunerated labour have taken different forms across the uneven core– periphery geography of global capitalism. The politics of labour regimes today are impacted by macro-historical transformations associated with the rise and fall of world hegemonies. Taken together, these perspectives better allow us to sketch out the structural limitations of production-based working-class politics across the globe in the twenty-first century.

Space and time

Improved means of communication and the liberalization of trade, resulting in globalization, has profoundly altered how regions link to each other. Such an empirical insight is of course trivial, but it is not as easy to understand how globalization has affected the ways that economic change in particular plays out in regional economies. So far, evolutionary economic geography has, with a few exceptions, refrained from integrating its ideas about novelty, retention and selection in regional economies with globalization.

In order to be relevant today and explain how regions change and grow in our time, the ideas of evolutionary economic geography need to be combined with a framework that allows us to explore and explain exactly how lower- cost and faster communications have transformed regional novelty, retention and selection processes in an era of globalization. In this chapter, we investigate whether “time geography” can provide such a framework (Hägerstrand 1991; Pred 1977). Although time geography has not frequently been used to answer research questions in economic geography, it has recently enjoyed something of a revived interest in transport geography (Neutens, Schwanen & Witlox 2011; Ellegård & Svedin 2012) and at the intersection between human geography and gender studies (Scholten, Friberg & Sandén 2012).

The Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand published the first papers about time geography in the early 1970s. Time geography focuses on individuals, how they move in space and over time, how people meet to accomplish projects and how people's movements are constrained by different identifiable factors. Hägerstrand never developed his time geography into a theory about economic production by explaining how “fitting people together” in space and time is (was) a necessary condition for the production of goods and services (Hägerstrand 1970). However, Hägerstrand came close to accomplishing this before he left economic geography to venture into other fields of research.

The importance of regional economic change and long- term growth

Regional economic change and long- term regional growth are important processes, because they directly affect the livelihoods of people. How regions cope with economic change, and what the longer- term growth patterns of regions look like, affect people's income, their living conditions and probably their decisions to stay in a region or to move out of it. To talk about regional economies is to talk about people's welfare. This book explores an evolutionary perspective on the processes of regional economic change and long- term regional growth.

Economic change is a story about how the lives of our recent ancestors gradually improved. Most of us, except a fortunate few, know that only 150 or 200 years ago, our ancestors were poor, living under very sparse material conditions, probably working in or close to the agricultural sector, which demanded hard labour, and with potentially fatal diseases lurking around every corner. At times, our recent ancestors might also have had to emigrate to make a better life for themselves in another country, if conditions and regulations even allowed moving outside their region. In many parts of the world, this is still true.

By an amazing process of economic change and growth, especially following the second industrial revolution in the 1800s, working conditions and living standards have improved greatly, at least in the “industrialized” economies. This process of change and growth has not been purely economic though. It has been intertwined with extraordinary developments in technologies, as well as changes in institutions and social relationships, creating new opportunities for our recent ancestors and, in that way, for many of our generation also.

Better and more efficient markets for goods and services, and for labour too, have been important drivers of this change. However, markets do not work unless they are partially regulated and monitored. Governments have important roles to play here. Regional and national governments need to make sure that some valuable resources that markets are not that good at catering for, such as well- functioning educational systems, exist.