Читать книгу Sustainable Futures - Raphael Kaplinsky - Страница 19

The shortage of labour contributed little to the declining rate of economic growth after the early 1970s. There were, of course, skills shortages in particular sectors and economies. But, in general, the quantity of labour available to support investment remained in relatively abundant supply. When labour shortages did occur in the high-income industrial countries during the post-war boom, labour was imported from the developing world. For example, the UK actively encouraged both unskilled workers and skilled migrants from the Caribbean and South Asia during the 1950s and 1960s. In Western and Northern Europe, millions of migrants were drawn from North Africa and Turkey, and after the turn of the millennium both skilled and unskilled labour were sourced from Central and Eastern Europe. Further, access to labour in the high-income economies was not limited to migration. At the world level, labour was in abundant supply. The deepening of globalization after the mid-1980s took advantage of this global labour force and outsourced millions of jobs in manufacturing and services, from the high-income economies to China and other low- and middle-income economies. This enabled the corporate sector to draw on a vast global pool of cheap unskilled, and increasingly also semi-skilled, workers.