THE GREAT WORK DILEMMA - EDUCATION, EMPLOYMENT, AND WAGES IN THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY

Advanced industrial economies in the 1990s face a work crisis in creat ing wage employment in a changing job market without greatly increased wage inequality. But this crisis is political as well as economic, an d the highly popular policy focus on more and better education as a so lution to the crisis cannot be conceptually separated from the larger politics which surrounds it. The paper suggests that there is a fundam ental conflict between a deregulatory philosophy of labor markets and policies that hope to use educational expansion as a means to increasi ng employment with higher productivity and wages. Rather than focusing on labor market deregulation, the paper argues, it is education and t raining that should be made more flexible. [JEL I 28] (C) 1997 Elsevie r Science Ltd.