Kim Swales is a Professor of Economics at the University of Strathclyde.
Swales is a graduate of Queens' College, Cambridge; his main research interests are in regional economics. In 1989 he joined the Fraser of Allander Institute to become a key member in an ESRC-funded project to develop a macro-micro model of the Scottish economy (AMOS).
He has published widely in the field of regional economics, regional modelling and regional policy and until recently was associate editor of Regional Studies and is on the management committee of the ESRC Urban and Regional Study Group.
In particular, he has worked with various novel approaches to helping unemployment such as tax breaks on value-added tax.
Swales is a coauthor of an alternative approach to the minimum wage submitted to the European Commission. [1] This provides incentives for a minimum wage without mandating it, by using tax breaks per employee to reduce the value added tax paid by employers. The report of the team's modelling states that this would not only increase employment levels but also increase GDP, i.e. it would reverse any unemployment and deadweight loss effects of a mandated minimum wage, acting as a Pigovian subsidy.
Labour economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the markets for wage labour. Labour is a commodity that supplied by labourers in exchange for a wage paid by demanding firms.
A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers can legally pay their workers—the price floor below which workers may not sell their labor. Most countries had introduced minimum wage legislation by the end of the 20th century.
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
A subsidy or government incentive is a form of financial aid or support extended to an economic sector generally with the aim of promoting economic and social policy. Although commonly extended from government, the term subsidy can relate to any type of support – for example from NGOs or as implicit subsidies. Subsidies come in various forms including: direct and indirect.
Employment is a relationship between two parties, usually based on a contract where work is paid for, where one party, which may be a corporation, for profit, not-for-profit organization, co-operative or other entity is the employer and the other is the employee. Employees work in return for payment, which may be in the form of an hourly wage, by piecework or an annual salary, depending on the type of work an employee does or which sector they are working in. Employees in some fields or sectors may receive gratuities, bonus payment or stock options. In some types of employment, employees may receive benefits in addition to payment. Benefits can include health insurance, housing, disability insurance or use of a gym. Employment is typically governed by employment laws, organisation or legal contracts.
Unemployment benefits are payments made by authorized bodies to unemployed people. In the United States, benefits are funded by a compulsory governmental insurance system, not taxes on individual citizens. Depending on the jurisdiction and the status of the person, those sums may be small, covering only basic needs, or may compensate the lost time proportionally to the previous earned salary.
A living wage is defined as the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs. This is not the same as a subsistence wage, which refers to a biological minimum. Needs are defined to include food, housing, and other essential needs such as clothing. The goal of a living wage is to allow a worker to afford a basic but decent standard of living through employment without government subsidies. Due to the flexible nature of the term "needs", there is not one universally accepted measure of what a living wage is and as such it varies by location and household type. A related concept is that of a family wage – one sufficient to not only support oneself, but also to raise a family.
A price floor is a government- or group-imposed price control or limit on how low a price can be charged for a product, good, commodity, or service. A price floor must be higher than the equilibrium price in order to be effective. The equilibrium price, commonly called the "market price", is the price where economic forces such as supply and demand are balanced and in the absence of external influences the (equilibrium) values of economic variables will not change, often described as the point at which quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal. Governments use price floors to keep certain prices from going too low.
Flexicurity is a welfare state model with a pro-active labour market policy. The term was first coined by the social democratic Prime Minister of Denmark Poul Nyrup Rasmussen in the 1990s.
A job guarantee (JG) is an economic policy proposal aimed at providing a sustainable solution to the dual problems of inflation and unemployment. Its aim is to create full employment and price stability, by having the state promise to hire unemployed workers as an employer of last resort (ELR).
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to economics:
In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. In the microeconomic theory of monopsony, a single entity is assumed to have market power over sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service, much in the same manner that a monopolist can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers.
The welfare trap theory asserts that taxation and welfare systems can jointly contribute to keep people on social insurance because the withdrawal of means-tested benefits that comes with entering low-paid work causes there to be no significant increase in total income. An individual sees that the opportunity cost of returning to work is too great for too little a financial return, and this can create a perverse incentive to not work.
The Employment Policies Institute is a fiscally conservative, non-profit American think tank that conducts and publishes research on employment issues, particularly aimed towards reducing the minimum wage. It was established in 1991 by Richard Berman, and has been described as "a nonprofit research group that studies issues of entry-level employment."
Dennis J. Snower is an American-German economist, specialising in macroeconomic theory and policy, labor economics and the psychology of economic decisions in "caring economics". He is President of the Global Solutions Initiative, providing policy advice to the G20, and Professor of Macroeconomics and Sustainability at the German Hertie School. He is former president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Professor of Economics at the Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel, where his labor and macroeconomic research showed that costs of adjusting employment, wages and prices play a central role in macroeconomic fluctuations. His psycho-social economics research indicates that economic decisions are driven by motives that depend on people's physical and social context.
Technological unemployment is the loss of jobs caused by technological change. It is a key type of structural unemployment.
Alan Manning is a British economist and professor of economics at the London School of Economics. Manning is one of the leading labour economists in Europe, having made major contributions to e.g. the analysis of the imperfections of labour markets.
Stephen Jonathan Machin is a British economist and professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). Moreover, he is currently director of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) and is a fellow of the British Academy and Society of Labor Economists. His current research interests include labour market inequality, the economics of education, and the economics of crime.
Michael R. Strain is an American economist. He is the John G. Searle Scholar and the director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
Francis Kramarz is a French economist who currently works as Professor at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique (ENSAE), where he has been directing the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST). He is one of the leading labour economists in France.
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