The institutional structure of global commodity chains and cross-border production networks has a profound impact on how the benefits of globalized production are distributed. This paper engages with this issue by developing a model that combines the insights of earlier unequal exchange...

When we speak of the impact of globalization on national and local economies, those economies are actually composed of a wide variety of individuals, each class of whom will be effected differently by large-scale economic forces. In this paper, produced for the U.N.'s International Labour...

This paper provides some empirical evidence on issues raised by the global antisweatshop movement. We first consider the relationship between wage and employment growth, finding no consistent trade-off between them. We then measure the share of labor costs in the production of garments in the...

"Expanding Decent Employment in Kenya: The Role of Monetary Policy, Inflation Control and the Exchange Rate” is the first installment of the forthcoming full-scale study, An Employment-Targeted Economic Program for Kenya by Robert Pollin and James Heintz of PERI and Mwangi Githinji of the...

What are the factors that make for a decent work environment and how do the conditions of work vary in different parts of the United States? To address these and similarly important questions in a clear and accessible way, we have developed a new approach for measuring the work environment on a...

This paper examines the connections among gender, employment, and poverty in Ghana using data from the fourth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey. The relationships are explored through a series of tabulations that shed light on how labor force segmentation, different forms of employment,...

This paper explores the distributional effects of contractionary monetary policy by race and gender in the U.S. from 1979-2008 using state-level panel data. We hypothesize that women and Blacks, as groups with less power and lower status in the social hierarchy, fare worse in the competition...

The Heritage Foundation recently released a response to “The Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy" by Robert Pollin, James Heintz & Heidi Garrett-Peltier, which, surprisingly, finds consensus on the central point of that study: that investments in clean energy will generate roughly...

The U.S. system of public infrastructure has deteriorated badly over the past generation. The breaching of New Orleans’ water levees in 2005 and the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis in 2007 offered tragic testimony to this long-acknowledged reality. The project of rebuilding our...

September 2008As the nation debates its energy future, this report shows that the U.S. can create two million jobs by investing in a rapid green economic recovery program, which will strengthen the economy, increase energy independence, and fight global warming.Green Recovery – A Program to...