Migration, Labor, and the International Political Economy

Abstract

In the field of international political economy, workers are commonly analyzed as objects of global economic forces whose fate is determined by the profit-seeking behaviors of firms and governments. Workers, however, can also assert themselves to protect their rights, and they can emigrate to other countries to find employment. We analyze the literature on the nexus between the international economy and labor with a focus on workers on both the receiving and originating ends of global finance. Beginning with workers as inputs in multinational production, we explore the roles of economic openness, factor endowments, government policy, and unionization as drivers of workers' rights. We then shift to workers as migrant labor and explore the impact of migrants' own cross-border financial transfers-also known as remittances-on political outcomes in their home countries. Our overview not only highlights tremendous progress in explaining the agency and vulnerability of labor in the global economy but also reveals significant weaknesses in recent research, especially a mismatch between micro-level theorizing and macro-level data analysis.

Financial remittances, trans-border conversations, and the state

“…Only recently have political scientists and political economists started to systematically look into the political consequences that these flows and outmigration more generally may have for sending countries (see Kapur, 2014;Meseguer & Burgess, 2014;Mosley & Singer, 2015 for reviews). Research so far has focused on the impact of remittances on electoral vs. non-electoral political behavior (Careja & Emmenegger, 2012;Germano, 2013;Goodman & Hiskey, 2008;Nyblade & O'Mahony, 2014;O'Mahony, 2013;Pérez-Armendáriz & Crow, 2010;Dionne, Inman & Montinola, 2014), as well as on the impact of remittances on the survival of autocrats and the likelihood of democratization (Ahmed, 2012;Escribà-Folch, Meseguer, & Wright, 2015;Moses, 2011;Pfutze, 2012Pfutze, , 2013.…”

Moving In and Moving Up? Labor Conditions and China's Changing Development Model

“…The literature on the relationship between labor conditions and the movement of capital is pessimistic as it posits that the relative mobility of capital over labor empowers firms at the expense of workers. The literature on labor conditions in the context of economic globalization and mobile capital debates the existence of a “race to the bottom” in standards through the pressures of international capital mobility (Huber and Stephens, ; Mosley and Singer, ). Governments will struggle to retain or attract investment through competitive deregulation of labor markets, adversely affecting employment security, protection, and other basic conditions such as wages and benefits.…”

Are Media at Work in Your Neighborhood? The Effects of Media Freedom, Internet Access, and Information Spillover on Workers’ Rights

“…This is perhaps owing to the fact that scholars have primarily included it as a control variable only, choosing instead to focus their analyses on factors owing to government‐directed economic policies. It is worth interrogating that the viability of workers’ supposed exit strategies given that legal barriers to immigration, which prevent many workers (especially less skilled ones) from credibly threatening to exit their current poor circumstances, represent an increasingly salient feature of contemporary globalization (Mosley and Singer, ). We expect that workers’ rights in neighboring countries have a positive effect on workers’ rights, but we model this effect using a SAR model rather than a regional average.…”