{"pk":3529,"title":"Theories of Labor and Industrial Location","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In the past 20 years, the threat of competition from low-wage coun­ tries in the Third World has been a recurring theme in the discourse of American economic policy. After two decades of job losses in the key manufacturing sectors of the postwar economy, as we strive to under­ stand the new dynamics of metropolitan labor markets, regional forma­ tions and shifts, and try to plan for our economic future, many are quick to point to high American wages with a kind of fatalism.\n \nNotwithstanding the fact that most of the real competitive ground has been lost to other developed countries, it is the recurring image of a Korean or Mexican worker, willing to work for a fraction of Ameri­ can wages, which continues to haunt debates in a number of fields: trade policy, where opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is precipitated by a desire to protect higher-wage American workers; education policy, where a workforce prepared for the \"high-tech jobs of the future• is widely seen as an imperative even before these jobs exist en masse; social policy, where excessive taxa­ tion and regulation, producing an •unfriendly business climate: can ostensibly drive industries to the far corners of the Earth.","language":"en","license":null,"keywords":[],"section":"Essays","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0r257599","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Edmund","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Egan","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2012-07-25T18:21:17Z","date_accepted":"2012-07-25T18:21:17Z","date_published":"1993-07-25T07:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/ucb_crp_bpj/article/3529/galley/2286/download/"}]}