Refine
Year of publication
- 2021 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Book (1)
- Working Paper (1)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies takes stock of the major economic challenges that advanced industrial democracies have faced since the early 1990s and the responses by governments to them. It has three goals: firstly, to further our understanding of how political economies have transformed over the past decades; secondly, to analyse the contribution of governments to these changes, by looking at their growth strategies and thirdly, to highlight and analyse the role of the reforms of welfare systems in this transformative change.
In a nutshell, this book maps and provides general understanding of the evolution of growth regimes in advanced capitalist countries. It identifies five main growth regimes in contemporary advanced capitalist economies (three export-led and two domestic demand-led ones). To do so the book combines a supply side approach to economic growth as advocated by the Varieties of Capitalism Literature (OUP, 2001) with a demand side perspective as the recent discussion on growth models has exemplified. It argues that all political economies consist of growth regimes, which are based on a set of institutions that shape the supply side of the economy as well as on demand drivers such as government spending and private consumption. Both supply and demand are heavily shaped by the welfare state which provides for skills through education systems and stimulates demand through high social spending and private pension funds. The book focuses on the analysis of welfare reforms as growth strategies pursued by governments in an era characterised by financialization and the rise of the knowledge economy.
This paper provides an overview of the actual and likely labour market transformations caused by increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies across the advanced economies, with a special focus on Germany. The scholarly debates on these issues mainly revolve around the impact of AI on the number and structure of jobs, and around AI-enabled management tools’ perpetuation and aggravation of work-related inequalities and discrimination. The study starts with a brief background of AI as a technology, with a focus on its definition, subfields, capabilities, and history. Following this, it reviews the discussions on the implications of AI use in the world of work and its ethical and political repercussions and continues with a summary of AI use and its impacts in German labour markets. It then discusses the current gaps in the relevant scholarly literature and identifies numerous opportunities for further research.
The investigation concludes by addressing two far-reaching implications of increasing utilisation of AI-enabled tools in labour markets. First, in the case that the current trends remain unchanged, the AI-driven future of work is likely to perpetuate and aggravate work-related inequalities and discrimination, diminishing further the prospects of decent work, fair remuneration and adequate social protection for all. Second, predictions provided by current studies only point out one possibility amongst many. Thus, we still have choices as to the advancement, adoption, and utilisation of workplace AI technologies in a way that brings benefit to all.