Globalization and Manufacturing Employment in the Global South

• In Event: 3247 - Open Topic on Sociology of Development

Abstract

Scholars of globalization have documented the emergence of a ‘new international division of labor’ in recent decades, where the production process has been fragmented and organized in global value chains that span multiple countries. As part of this process, certain manufacturing activities have increasingly been relocated to the global South. While this reorganization of the global manufacturing sector led many scholars to reasonably conclude that globalization would help developing nations spur manufacturing employment, more recent work has documented a process of ‘premature’ deindustrialization where developing nations are starting to shed manufacturing employment at much lower levels of development compared to the historical experiences of today’s rich countries. Further, while there are theoretical reasons to suspect that the phenomenon of ‘premature deindustrialization’ is being driven by competitive pressures associated with globalization, past research has not explicitly examined how global competition affects manufacturing employment in the global South. In this study, I develop two measures of global competition in manufacturing export markets that leverage country-level, temporal, and industry-level variation in export performance, measured share of world manufacturing exports. I then test the effects of these measures of export performance on manufacturing share of employment in developing nations using data drawn from multiple sources. Preliminary results suggest that the ability of countries to perform well in export markets relative to other countries is a key factor shaping trends in manufacturing share of employment in the global South.

Author

• Roshan Kumar Pandian, Indiana University