Education, Vocational Training and R&D: Towards New Forms of Labor Market Regul...

• Author(s): Lopes, Margarida Chagas
• Date: 2011
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/3412
• Origin: Repositório da UTL
• Subject(s): labor market regulation; education and training; innovation; knowledge; North-South divide; Portugal
• Document Type: Other
• Language: English

Description

A draft version of this paper has been presented at the RLDWL 7th. Congress "Labor and Sustainable Development", University of Beijing - 9-12 June 2010. Labor market regulation and its relations with education and training have been performing an historical trajectory which closely intertwined with developments in economic thought. Under the form of human capital theories, neo-classical economics set the bridge between labor market equilibrium and education outputs for decades. The functionalist approach behind that lasting relationship was to be challenged by economic crises and globalization, which imposed the unquestionable supremacy of the demand for skilled work. Likewise, even if only that more strict perspective of education would prevail, which fortunately is not the case, time and hazard came to undertake its denigration on the grounds of a severe loss of regulatory efficiency as globalization was setting up. In this paper we shed light on the increasing role which innovation is called to perform in labor market hetero regulation in the present phase of globalization. Depending on the institutional design throughout which R&D become embedded in nowadays societies, evidence clearly reveals how innovation strategies are to be found so asymmetrically implemented between developed and developing countries, thereby leading to the enlarging divide between the "new North" and "new South" globalization off springs.