The Global Studies Colloquium Series in conjunction with the Orfalea Fellowship for the Master's Program in Global Studies is proud to present a talk by Aashish Mehta, "Is Work Globalizing?" 

We investigate the claim that national labor markets have become more globally interconnected in recent decades. The claim has had a profound influence on several policy debates, often bolstering arguments against policies that could reduce economic inequality. However, aside from a few studies of advanced economies, it has not been examined seriously. We argue that labor markets can globalize (or de-globalize) in different ways, and that different notions of globalized labor matter for different policy debates. We illustrate this by analyzing how sound stimulus, exchange rate and human resource policies depend, respectively, on three distinct notions of what it means for work to globalize. We then assemble employment and related data from a very large number of countries – capturing some 80% of the world’s population - and analyze the extent to which each country’s labor market has globalized in each of these three dimensions. We find that work has globalized in some dimensions but deglobalized in others, often in the same country; and that some countries’ labor markets become more globalized over time, while others became less deglobalized, along the same dimension. We also find massive variations in the levels of each type of labor globalization across countries. Platitudes about how globalized labor markets are, or are becoming, are therefore seriously misleading and often exaggerated. Policy makers need to adopt a both case- and problem-specific approach to thinking about how globalization has changed the economic landscape they confront, and how this should alter the choices they make.

The event will take place on Wednesday, February 21^st from 12-1 PM in SSMS 2001. After the talk, the speaker will join the audience for informal lunch and conversation. The event is free to attend.

Please see the attached flyer for more details.