Journal Article

With an increasing growth of human population, rising GDP levels and more affluent lifestyles, the human race is consuming more and more which leads to a continuously growing demand for renewable and non-renewable resources. Therefore, the issue of resource scarcity is emerging, because it is questionable whether economic growth can be sustained in a world with finite natural resources. The main purpose of this work is to analyze the potential of Industry 4.0 applications to realize a more sustainable manufacturing and to create a circular economy (CE). Even if the economy nowadays is still locked into a system favoring the linear model of production and consumption, tighter environmental standards, resource scarcity and changing consumer expectations will force organizations to find alternatives. To do so, new technologies can be used to trace materials through the supply chain and to track product status during its life cycle. This development will create opportunities to accelerate the transition towards the model of a CE. Case examples show that companies are starting to capitalize on the potential of emerging technologies to rearrange production, services, business models or whole organizations in a more sustainable way. Main conclusions of this research are that there is a high potential of Industry 4.0 to ensure more sustainable manufacturing methods or a CE. This is shown by analyzing the value drivers of Industry 4.0, the potential of rearranging value chains and emerging business models. Overall, smart products and Industry 4.0 technologies could generate significant economic, environmental and social benefits and are able to contribute to strive towards a CE.

US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in Europe also experienced a "productivity miracle." US multinationals obtained higher productivity from IT than non-US multinationals, particularly in the same sectors responsible for the US productivity acceleration. Furthermore, establishments taken over by US multinationals (but not by non-US multinationals) increased the productivity of their IT. Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices.

This article reports on household survey measurements of the “offshorability” of jobs, defined as the ability to perform the work from abroad. We develop multiple measures of offshorability, using both self-reporting and professional coders. All measures find that roughly 25% of US jobs are offshorable. Our three preferred measures agree between 70% and 80% of the time. Professional coders appear to provide the most accurate assessments. Empirically, more educated workers appear to hold somewhat more offshorable jobs, and offshorability does not have systematic effects on either wages or the probability of layoff.

Using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 US Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational codes, this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy/hard it is to offshore the work either physically or electronically. Using this ranking, it is estimated that somewhere between 22% and 29% of all US jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two. (No estimate is made of how many jobs will actually be offshored.) Since the rankings are subjective, two alternatives are presented one is entirely objective, the other is an independent subjective ranking. In general, they corroborate the rankings, albeit not perfectly. It is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation’s “offshorability” and the skill level of its workers (as measured either by educational attainment or wages). However, it appears that, controlling for education, the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004.

We estimate the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labour and the pace of skill-biased technological change at the industry level. The data is compiled from the March extract of the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1968 to 2006. Industry information provided by the survey is used to group workers into 13 industry categories and education levels are used to dichotomize workers as skilled or unskilled. We construct measures of the ratio of skilled to unskilled employment and the ratio of skilled to unskilled wages in each industry. Using a relationship implied by profit maximizing behaviour on the part of representative firms, this data generates estimates of structural parameters. We find considerable differences across industries in the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labour. Furthermore, while most industries have experienced skill-biased technological change, the pace of this change has varied widely across industries.

Purpose – The paper aims to explore the nature and purpose of higher education (HE) in the twenty-first century, focussing on how it can help fashion a green knowledge-based economy by developing approaches to learning and teaching that are social, networked and ecologically sensitive. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a discursive analysis of the skills and knowledge requirements of an emerging green knowledge-based economy using a range of policy focussed and academic research literature. Findings – The business opportunities that are emerging as a more sustainable world is developed requires the knowledge and skills that can capture and move then forward but in a complex and uncertain worlds learning needs to non-linear, creative and emergent. Practical implications – Sustainable learning and the attributes graduates will need to exhibit are prefigured in the activities and learning characterising the work and play facilitated by new media technologies. Social implications – Greater emphasis is required in higher learning understood as the capability to learn, adapt and direct sustainable change requires interprofessional co-operation that must utlise the potential of new media technologies to enhance social learning and collective intelligence. Originality/value – The practical relationship between low-carbon economic development, social sustainability and HE learning is based on both normative criteria and actual and emerging projections in economic, technological and skills needs.

Despite significant progress in reducing gender inequalities in the labour market over the last several decades, gender gaps in employment rates still persist, and women continue to be consistently overrepresented in low-paid sectors as well as in part-time and temporary jobs. And while a long-term convergence in employment opportunities seems to be underway – setting aside for now considerations on employment quality and conditions – it is worth noting that recent improvements were mainly driven by a relative worsening of the male employment rate due to considerable job losses in male-dominated sectors during the economic crisis. Recent data shows that the gender employment gap, defi ned here as the difference between the employment rates of men and women aged 15-64, stood at 10.4 percentage points in 2015 – while men had an employment rate of 70.8%, the figure for women was just 60.4%. To put it bluntly, this differential corresponds to 17 million women, which is roughly the entire population of the Netherlands. Yet average figures mask a great heterogeneity among EU countries: Italy, Greece and Malta are amongst the worst-performing member states, while Scandinavian and Baltic countries provide more gender-balanced employment opportunities. This picture not only presents differences in the structure of the labour market and composition of the labour force, but also reflects the diversity in terms of national institutional setups, policy regimes and cultural values, which are known to have signifi cant effects on women’s participation in the labour market. This paper will investigate the economic and the social costs associated with the observed gender employment gap. It will then discuss key aspects of the needed policy responses to foster and promote labour market participation among women.

It is well-known in the literature that self-employment positively influences job satisfaction, but the effects on other life domains and overall life satisfaction are much less clear. Our study analyzes the welfare effects of self-employment apart from its monetary aspects and focuses on the overall life satisfaction as well as different domain satisfactions of self-employed individuals in our German sample from 1997 to 2010. Using matching estimators to create an appropriate control group and differentiating between different types of self-employment, we find that voluntary self-employment brings with it positive benefits apart from work satisfaction, and leads to higher overall life satisfaction as well as increased health satisfaction, all of which increase in the first three years of self-employment. Being forced into self-employment to escape unemployment, however, confers no such benefits. Additionally, both types of self-employment lead to increasing dissatisfaction with one’s leisure time.

Across many developed economies, policy foregrounds the role of innovation in stimulating economic recovery and underpinning growth. Higher education is expected to contribute significantly to the innovation agenda. This paper examines one example of innovation in the UK higher education context, namely the creation of a spinout company, and explores its implications for the individual knowledge worker. Focusing on the developing professional identities of those involved, the narrative draws on data from an ethnographic study of the birth of a university spinout company and its eventual launch as an independent company. Utilising the concept of ‘third space’ to frame the spinout experience, it argues that individuals engaging in ‘innovative’ activities of a commercial nature in higher education develop hybrid roles at the margins of their organisations. The extent to which these are tenable over the longer term is debated.