Documents Bacchetta, Marc 3 results

"Globalization is widely seen as a powerful engine that has the potential to promote growth and development. For many years, however, concerns have also been raised about the effects of globalization on jobs and wages. This has led to questions about the social sustainability of globalization.
Jointly published by the ILO and the WTO, with funding by the International Chamber of Commerce, this publication consists of contributions by leading academic experts who analyse the various channels through which globalization affects jobs and wages. Together, the nine chapters in this volume summarize state-of-the art knowledge on themes related to the social dimension of globalization.
The volume, therefore, represents a step in the direction of a better understanding of the mechanisms through which globalization affects workers and of the measures that governments can take to give globalization a strong social dimension. It will be of value to all those who are interested in the debate on the social sustainability of globalization, including workers and employers, policy-makers, academics, and other trade and labour specialists. "

"In recent decades, the global economy has experienced a profound transformation due to trade integration and technological progress as well as important political changes. This transformation has been accompanied by significant positive effects at the global level, as increased trade integration has helped to raise incomes in advanced and developing economies, lifting millions out of poverty. At the same time, it has translated into changes experienced by individuals, companies and communities. While overall, better job opportunities are on the rise, workers who are forced to leave their existing jobs may find it difficult to share in these improvements.

Policies aimed at facilitating adjustment can reduce the number of those left behind by trade or technology, while at the same time raising the net gains from these developments, improving overall efficiency and boosting incomes.

Given the role of skills in productivity and in trade performance as well as in access to employment and wage distribution, a strong emphasis on skills development is vital for both firms and workers. This publication argues that in the current fast-changing context of globalization, where technology and trade relations evolve rapidly, the responsiveness of skills supply to demand plays a central role not only from an efficiency perspective, but also from a distributional perspective. Featuring results from the ILO's Skills for Trade and Economic Diversification (STED) programme, this report shows that appropriate skills development policies are key to helping firms participate in trade, and also to helping workers find good jobs."

"Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a discussion among researchers and policy makers about changes to global value chains, both about expected changes and changes that should be promoted by government policies. In this paper we conduct an in-depth analysis of the reasons for changes in global value chains as a result of COVID-19 both from a positive angle, analysing expected changes in the behaviour of firms, and from a normative angle, assessing the different arguments for policy interventions by governments. After this analysis international cooperation of trade policies and the role of WTO in crises like the COVID -19 pandemic is explored. The analysis generates three main conclusions. First, the COVID-19 pandemic could contribute to diversification of sources of supply whose extent will vary by sector depending on the costs of value chain reorganization. The pandemic, by contrast, is not likely to contribute much to re-shoring, the return of manufacturing activities to industrialized countries, which is more likely to be driven by pre-existing trends such as rising factor costs in emerging countries, increasing uncertainty about trade policy, and robotization and automation of production. Second, the pandemic has led to increased attention to the provision of essential goods in situations of crisis and our analysis concludes that to achieve this objective, global cooperation should be preferred to national policies such as domestic production and export restrictions. Third, the largest risk for the global economy in the aftermath of the pandemic is a move away from open, non-discriminatory trade policies, which would jeopardize the large benefits of open trade regimes in the current global economy characterized by scale economies, innovation spillovers, and a global division of labour."