This paper analyzes the growing role played by exports and investment in China's rapid economic growth since 1978. It examines the reasons for the shift over time in China's growth model, which occurred in stages, and it questions the sustainability of the recent dependence on exports and...

Unemployment disciplines workers and reduces the wage that firms must pay to prevent shirking. Equilibrium unemployment is too low from the perspective of the profit-maximizing firm because each firm fails to account for the reduction in unemployment imposed by its own hiring. An executive...

One aspect of the contemporary crisis of the United States economy has been a sharp increase since the mid-1960s in the reliance on debt finance by corporations, households, and the federal government. This paper focuses on the borrowing behavior of nonfinancial corporations. It first presents...

The term "living wage" has been used in two separate ways: (1) a wage rate that will enable workers and their families to live above a reasonable poverty threshold; and (2) a somewhat more ambitious standard, a wage rate that will meet a family's basic budgetary needs. Both of these concepts are...

Since 1994, so-called "living wage" ordinances have passed in 20 cities in the United States, and activists are advancing similar proposals throughout the country. These proposals are a response to the declining real wages of low-wage workers in the United States-what David Gordon termed "the...