Trouble for Workers and the Poor: Economic Globalization and the Reshaping of American Politics
In recent decades in the United States, even as inequalities of income and wealth have greatly increased, redistributive programs have tended to be curtailed. In some cases, government policies have begun to exacerbate, rather than moderate, inequality. Since this has occurred not only under the Republican Reagan and Bush administrations, but also in the Democratic Carter and Clinton administrations, it suggests that the politics of redistribution may have been fundamentally transformed. Moreover, evidence from aborad indicates that there has been a shift away from redistributive policies throughout the advanced industrial world. The implications of this trend and the prognosis for the future depend upon its precise political causes. To the extent that it has resulted from changes in contingent political forces -- especially increases in the political power of capital and concomitant losses of power by labor, together with much stronger anti-redistributive stands by business -- one can imagine a revival of redistribution, based on increased organization, mobilization, and political struggle by working people and the poor. Some signs of such struggle have in fact appeared. To the extent that the trend is structural, however -- based on changed technology and such international economic factors as lower trade barriers, extensive immigration, lower transportation and communication costs, and increased capital mobility -- the heightened power of capital and weakness of labor are likely to persist for a long time to come. Moreover, economic globalization may be making it more and more difficult for governments to redistribute income without counterproductive effects such as capital flight, loss of export competitiveness, and increased immigration of low-income people. Thus economic globalization may gravely impair, or even eliminate, the capacity -- as well as the will -- of nation-states to redistribute income or wealth within their boundaries. If this is so, remedies will be hard to come by. The logic of economic globalization implies that only global remedies will work. It is possible that only worldwide organization by workers, or universally applicable treaties and agreements, could effectively check (let alone reverse) increases in income inequality in advanced industrial countries. But such solutions would arouse intense political opposition and would probably face conflicts of interest between workers in rich and poor countries.
Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper No . 273 ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION , DOMESTIC POLITICS AND INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES : A CROSS-NATIONAL ANALYSIS
During the last decade, few issues have generated as much debate among scholars, policy-makers and political activists as the relationship between economic globalization and domestic income inequality in the developed world. The central aim of this paper is to offer an empirical assessment of the impact of economic globalization on the distribution of income generated by the market and the ability and willingness of states to redistribute it. Three basic analyses will be conducted. The first and most extensive is an unbalanced pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of the international and domestic sources of cross-national variance in income distribution and redistribution for various years between the early 1980s and the early 1990s. This analysis will employ measures of post-government disposable income, pre-government earnings and fiscal redistribution that have been calculated from household-level income surveys available from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), which provides by far the most comprehensive, detailed and accurate cross-national data on income inequality currently available. 1 The second analysis will offer a full-scale pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of less complete and comparable annual data from non-LIS sources on pre-government wage dispersion between 1970 and 1990. Finally, the paper will examine trends over an even longer period in the distribution of post-government income in a single country, the United States, for which reliable annual figures are available for the period from 1967 to 1996. Among the questions addressed in the paper are the following: Is integration into the world economy systematically related to domestic income inequality across countries or over time? Can any economic dislocation resulting from globalization be ameliorated by the redistributive activities of the state? Are there differences in the impact of the three main modes of international integration, trade, direct foreign investment and global financial flows? To what extent are income distribution and redistribution the product of essentially domestic political variables not directly associated with economic globalization? The Distributive Effect of Economic Globalization As might be imagined, the interaction among global economic integration, income inequality and public social benefit provision has been the subject of widely varying 2 interpretations in the scholarly literature. On the one hand, many commentators have argued that there is a clear positive relationship between economic globalization and market income and Reich, 1992). In this view, the rapidly growing movement of goods and capital throughout the world has driven a wedge into domestic economies, separating those who are well positioned to gain …
An assessment of the Impact of Devolution on Women Empowerment in Nakuru County
-Women have been grossly marginalized in organs of decision-making and governance structures. The Constitution of Kenya has sought to bridge this gap by providing both women and men the right to equal treatment, including the right to equal opportunities in political, economic, cultural and social spheres. However, gender equality has not been achieved and women are still lagging in terms of decision making processes. The main objective of the study was to detemine the impact of devolution on women empowerment in Nakuru County. The study found that substantive women representation, development of programs and accessibility of services had a positive effect on the women empowerment in Nakuru County. The study also found out that increased accessibility of Services by women influenced women empowerment, this study also concludes that the introduction of development programs had the greatest impact on women empowerment in Nakuru County. The study recommends that more programs targeting women should be introduced as these have the greatest impact on women empowerment. The findings may be used to make conclusions and recommendations.