Highly Skilled Labour (highly + skilled_labour)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Europe and the Immigration of Highly Skilled Labour

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 5 2001
Sami Mahroum
The competition for highly skilled labour continues to be fierce and is taking a more institutionalized pattern across most of the developed world. This article sketches the changes in policies, legislations, and procedures across various EU countries and compares these with those of other developed countries. The article shows that EU member states not only compete with non-EU countries and regions but also among themselves in order to attract and maintain sufficient flows of highly skilled labour. [source]


Migration Policy and Industrial Structure: The Case of Switzerland

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 2 2008
Leonhard Becker
ABSTRACT Structural change in OECD countries, emphasizing knowledge-based sectors, has led to an increasing demand for highly skilled labour. One means of meeting this demand has been to implement a selective immigration policy. Such policies, however, have been criticized for channelling labour into low-producing sectors and occupations, hampering structural change. Proponents of such criticism point to Switzerland's former policy of channelling immigrants into so-called seasonal sectors, a practice abandoned in the early 1990s, as having contributed to Switzerland's low growth rates. To assess this, we here analyse the amended migration policy's effects on skill structure and sectoral distribution of immigration flows using data from the Swiss Census of 1990 and 2000 to determine whether the new policy has led to an immigrant inflow more adapted to the processes of structural change. We find that the share of highly skilled immigrants has increased notably under the new migration policy. Our analysis also shows an important change in the sectoral focus of the new arrival inflow. Not only have fewer immigrants been entering declining sectors, but the majority of migrants arriving under the new policy regime have been absorbed into growing and knowledge-based sectors, meaning they are employed primarily in service and knowledge-intensive sectors. Overall, the analysis provides ample evidence that the current admission policy as ositively contributed to tructural change in Switzerland. [source]


Europe and the Immigration of Highly Skilled Labour

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 5 2001
Sami Mahroum
The competition for highly skilled labour continues to be fierce and is taking a more institutionalized pattern across most of the developed world. This article sketches the changes in policies, legislations, and procedures across various EU countries and compares these with those of other developed countries. The article shows that EU member states not only compete with non-EU countries and regions but also among themselves in order to attract and maintain sufficient flows of highly skilled labour. [source]


Employment impacts of cleaner production , evidence from a German study using case studies and surveys

BUSINESS STRATEGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Issue 3 2001
Friedhelm Pfeiffer
The study assesses net employment effects of technical progress, which can be expected by the ongoing transition from end-of-pipe technologies towards cleaner production. Empirical evidence is presented on the basis of case studies and firm data including a telephone survey from German industry. The main result is that the transition from end-of-pipe technologies to cleaner production leads to a net creation of jobs, which is however restricted to a only small number of firms and to the group of highly skilled labour. Eco-innovations, like other innovations, are non-neutral. The demand for skilled and highly skilled labour rises while the demand for unskilled labour decreases. Synergies between environmental, labour market and innovation policy are apparent but they are however small and specific. The exploitation of these synergies requires the design of specific policy programmes differentiating between types of eco-innovation. The promotion of product-integrated environmental measures should be more successful if new products complement older ones, while process-integrated environmental measures should be more successful if consumers' demand is more price elastic. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment [source]