Tasks, Skills, and Institutions: The Changing Nature of Work and Inequality

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The book investigates the trends in earnings inequalities in developing countries to determine the main drivers. Particular attention is paid to extending the most conventional explanations of changes in earnings inequality, based on the relative abundance of skilled and unskilled labour, with recent theories that put the nature of tasks performed by workers in their jobs, rather than their skills, at the centre of the analysis. The latter approach has helped to explain relevant patterns recently observed in the trends in earnings inequality in the US and other industrialized countries. Developed countries have experienced a polarization in earnings and in employment, namely stronger growth in the earnings and jobs for the most and least skilled workers at the expense of those in the middle. This pattern has been attributed to differences in tasks-whether a given job is routine and can be automated or offshored-rather than skills, and has reduced employment and incomes in typical middle-class jobs in manufacturing and services. However, this narrative has been developed in the context of mature industrialized economies on the frontier of technological change that have also seen a large set of activities offshored to emergent economies. Evidence for developing countries, however, is still scarce and faces bigger challenges, both conceptual, and in terms of gathering the necessary data on earnings and task content of jobs. This book presents the main results of the UNU-WIDER project, The Changing Nature of Work and Inequality, aiming to fill this knowledge gap.

Carlos Gradín, Professor of Applied Economics, University of Vigo, Spain, Piotr Lewandowski, President of the Board, Institute for Structural Research (IBS), Warsaw, Poland, Simone Schotte, Project Director, Finnish Overseas Consultants (FinnOC), Kunal Sen, Director, UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, Finland
Carlos Gradín holds a PhD in economics (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 1999). He is Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Vigo, Spain, and has been a Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, Finland. His main research interests are poverty, inequality, and discrimination. He is especially interested in inequalities between population groups and deals with enhancing the empirical evidence as well as methodological tools for the measurement and understanding of those issues.

Piotr Lewandowski is a labour economist, a President of the Board at the Institute for Structural Research (IBS), Warsaw, Poland, and a Research Fellow at the IZA, Bonn, and RWI Essen, Germany. His research interests include the impact of technology on labour markets, structural and occupational change, job quality, minimum wage, energy poverty, and the labour market effects of climate and energy policies.

Simone Schotte is a development economist focusing on inequality, social stratification, and labour markets research. She is a Project Director at Finnish Overseas Consultants (FinnOC) and has been a Research Associate at UNU-WIDER as well as a consultant to the World Bank. She holds a PhD from the University of Göttingen and her research has been published in journals such as World Development, Journal of Economic Inequality, Journal of Development Studies, Kyklos, International Migration Review, among others.

Kunal Sen is Director of UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, Finland, and Professor of Development Economics, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK (on leave). He has over three decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research. He has performed extensive research on the political economy of growth and development, international finance, the dynamics of poverty, social exclusion, female labour force participation, and the informal sector in developing economies. His research has focused on India, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. He was awarded the Sanjaya Lall Prize in 2006 and the Dudley Seers Prize in 2003 for his publications.