Floaters,moonlighters, and the underemployed: A national labor market with Chinese characteristics

A national labor market has emerged as one of the most fundamental institutional changes in the PRC. Foreign direct investment has played a direct role. The Chinese national labor market, albeit with noticeable distortions, has provided a stable and abundant supply of cheap unskilled or low‐skilled labor and subsidized skilled labor and professionals, and enhanced labor mobility and autonomy in general. The national labor market has been strongly blessed by Beijing, as it feels it can effectively rely on the hukou (household registration) system to stabilize the massive underemployment at a time of comprehensive dislocations caused by the advancing market economy. The sociopolitical impact of the national labor market, however, is mounting as urban unemployment rises, the numbers of floating laborers grow and become increasingly restless, and the PRC government has become more apparently pro‐employer at the expense of labor.     

IRELAND, NORTHERN IRELAND AND 1992: THE BARRIERS TO TECHNOCRATIC ANTI-PARTITIONISM

This article examines the likely effects of 1992 on the relationship between the Republic and Northern Ireland. In particular, it seeks to assess the strategy of undermining partition through economic integration. After looking at the positions of the advocates of such a strategy and of its opponents, the difficulties in the way of the successful pursuit of such a policy are examined. These are: the extent to which the Single European Act will be made fully operative; the economic limits on cross-border cooperation; the administrative and governmental difficulties of pursuing cross-border cooperation; and the degree to which the political and cultural foundations of partition are independent of the economy. The article concludes with the argument that these barriers are such that a reliance on the pressures generated by the Single European Act and on a purely technocratic strategy of cross-border cooperation will not be sufficient to alter the constitutional relationship between the Republic and Northern Ireland.