Technological Upgrading and Educational Composition of the Workforce
| When: | Friday, 17 May 2024 - Friday, 17 May 2024 |
| Where: | Online Event Parktown Management Campus |
| Start time: | 9:00 |
| Enquiries: |
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| RSVP: | |
| Cost: | Free |
SCIS invites you to a hybrid seminar with Dev Nathan titled Technological Upgrading and Educational Composition of the Workforce on 17 May, 09:00 -10:30 (SAST)
In the global production system, there is a division of labour, based on a division of knowledge between lead (headquarter) firms and contract suppliers. While lead firms have, so far, largely been located in the Global North, some countries of the Global South have advanced along to progress from supplier to headquarter firms. This paper studies the manner in which the skill requirement or educational composition of the workforce changes in this process of technological advancement. The countries studied are China, India, and South Korea with the USA taken as the comparator country. The paper starts with the overall trajectory of technological development in these countries. It then analyses the ways in which firm-level R&D, taken as the indicator and driver of firms’ technology development strategies, is related to changes in productivity and the educational composition of the workforce. The paper shows that there is a broad positive correlation between the three variables, R&D investment, labour productivity and educational composition of the workforce. It points to the need to advance this analysis to look at other workforce indicators, such as the gender composition, wages, the quality of employment and the nature of supervision. At a methodological level, the paper argues that it is necessary to look at the role of a firm within a GVC to understand the composition of its workforce.
Professor Dev Nathan is a 2023/2024 Cameron Schrier Equality Fellow at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS). He is also with the Institute for Human Development, Delhi, and a Visiting Scholar, The New School for Social Research, New York. Research Director at GenDev Centre, Gurgaon, he is Series Co-editor of Development Trajectories in Global Value Chains, Cambridge University Press.
Just Out: Reverse Subsidies in Global Monopsony Capitalism. 2022
Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation, 2020
GVCs and Development in Asia: Challenges of Upgrading and Innovation, 2018
Labour in Global Value Chains in Asia, 2016
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