POWER SHIFT: THE RISING CONTROL OF DISTRIBUTORS AND RETAILERS IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN FOR MANUFACTURED GOODS
The development of new technology combined with the process of deregulation is changing the organizational structure of firms in the wholesale sector. These factors are altering the traditional location of wholesale and warehouse employment, and a variety of countervailing locational tendencies are emerging, including the decentralization of large mass wholesalers and their warehousing complexes and increasing specialization of inner-urban wholesale and warehouse functions. Nationally based wholesalers now transport goods off-hours to meet the needs of large-destination customers. Small, specialized firms make use of new technology to reduce costs, while offering highly tailored services to traditional customers. There also is a general reduction in wholesale employment, with losses concentrated in inner-urban areas as large wholesalers move their warehousing operations out to rural and adjacent suburban areas to take advantage of cheaper land and labor.
Changes in inventory management and the business cycle
“I remember one day in the summer of 1975 when a CBO [Congressional Budget Office] staffer returnedfrom a congressional hearing with some amazing news, Alan Greenspan, then President Gerald Ford’s chief economic adviseti hadjust testified that the recession was mostly an inventory correction. We all snickered at the idea that what was, up to then, the deepest recession since the Great Depression could have been ‘only’an inventory cycle. When I subsequently studied the data more carefully, howeverç I learned that Greenspan had been right. Like most of the recessions before and since, the 1973-5 contraction was dominated by changes in inventory investment,”
To Devolve or Not To Devolve? Welfare Reform in the States
This article analyzes variation in the degree to which states have responded to the devolution of welfare at the federal level by devolving authority over welfare policy to local government. I find that to the extent that states have devolved authority to lower levels of government, they tend to be states that already had a high degree of involvement of local government in welfare provision. In states without this record of local government involvement, the devolution that has occurred has not generated greater involvement of local government, but rather responsibility has been devolved to regional entities with ties to workforce development and with a substantial degree of business involvement. As states gain increasing authority over a redistributive policy, they may begin to treat it as a subset of a larger developmental policy—workforce development.