I review three key claims regarding the impact of production globalization on manufacturing workers worldwide, and subject them to empirical scrutiny. Some argue that production globalization causes a “race to the bottom” that leads to a downward convergence of manufacturing workers’ labor power worldwide. Others suggest instead that production globalization leads to an upward convergence of labor power among manufacturing workers worldwide. A third perspective is agnostic with respect to the average level of this labor power, but predicts divergence between the global North and global South. Using a novel empirical approach to cross-national and temporally comparable measurement of manufacturing labor market power, I show that both the (country-average) level and (between-country) dispersion of labor market power have increased worldwide since the mid-1960s. To explain these trends, I juxtapose insights from Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory with those from the interdisciplinary literature on global value chains and production networks. Both predict that globalization should increase labor market power more in the global North than in the global South. However, the former focuses on labor demand shocks from international trade, while the latter focuses on relationships between firms in the North and South in light of the strategic behavior of network/chain leaders. Augmenting the empirical approach to the measurement of the aggregate positional power of national manufacturing firms developed elsewhere, I show that both international trade and positional power matter for the distribution of manufacturing labor-market power worldwide, but the latter effects are stronger. I conclude by positioning these results within larger debates about the fate of labor in a globalized manufacturing economy.

This paper offers an alternative to the view that high technology promotes development and low technology inhibits development. We differentiate between monopoly technology and accessible technology. Monopoly technology produces growth by producing monopoly rents. As a byproduct, it also produces substantial inequality, both within nations and globally. Accessible technology produces growth without monopoly simply by increasing the volume of production in a lucrative business. We illustrate this first with a consideration of successful agrarian-based development in the global North that was based on agricultural products that were not particularly monopolized. We then move to a detailed consideration of fishing in nineteenth-century Norway. Norway’s economic development depended on proceeds from fishing exports. Norwegian fishing had a distinctive technology that made it particularly low-tech and egalitarian. It produced substantial wealth for the nation while producing very little social inequality.

Conceptual discussions of sustainability emphasize the interdependent relationship between relevant social and environmental factors. Yet, traditional quantitative analyses of the topic have tended to estimate the exogenous or direct/indirect effects a predictor variable has on a particular measure of sustainability. We examine the endogenous, interdependent relationship between the three E’s of sustainability (economy, equity, and ecology), incorporating country-level data for 1990 through 2015 into cross-lagged structural equation models with reciprocal and fixed effects. Results from these longitudinal models suggest that over time, at the country level, increasing economic inequality reduces renewable energy consumption, with no evidence of reciprocal feedback. Keeping in mind the limitations of the analysis, we tentatively argue that the modern form of development has constrained the potential for the sustainability goals to feed back into each other.

Since the turn of the millennium, the landscape of development in Africa has undergone a dramatic shift. China has significantly expanded its foreign aid and investment in the region, decentering the West as Africa's main development partner. What is largely missing from China-Africa scholarship, however, is attention to how the new Chinese presence in Africa is both embedded in and altering everyday social relations. This article examines these issues in a rural setting in Uganda that is in the midst of a large-scale transformation into a China-funded industrial park. It reveals that the complex new politics of Chinese development assistance are intertwined with, and often exacerbate, existing social inequalities based in politics, class, ethnicity, and race. More conceptually, these dynamics demonstrate the need to rethink how we frame development as a transnational field of social practice. China is more than an outlier within the global field of development and instead should be viewed as pursuing its own form of development, what I call “developmental pragmatism.” As this case study illustrates, this developmental pragmatism often turns on synergies between the business-focused development approach of the Chinese and the priorities of more authoritarian governments—synergies that require much greater critical attention.

We argue that sociological analyses of inequality could benefit from engaging the literatures on decision-making. In turn, a sociological focus on how contexts and structural constraints influence the outcomes of decisions and the strategies social groups can use in pursuit of their goals could inform our understanding of decision-making. We consider a simple two-class model of income and the need of capitalists and workers to mobilize resources to influence the adaptive landscape that shapes responses to decisions. We then examine the implications of the rational actor model and the heuristics and biases literature for class-based decision-making. We consider the importance of altruism in mobilizing collective action, and we offer some evidence that altruism is most common in the middle ranges of income and that altruism is a major influence on support for redistributive policies. These results, while tentative, suggest the value of having scholars of development and inequality engage with the literatures on decision-making.

This paper empirically assesses, for the first time, the relationship between immigration and national economic development in both the global North and the global South. A series of panel models demonstrate that immigration exacerbates North-South inequalities through differential effects on average per capita incomes in the global North and global South. Immigration has positive effects on average incomes in both the North and the South, but the effect is larger in the global North. Thus the relationship between immigration and development evinces a Matthew Effect at the world level: by contributing to differential levels of economic development in the North and South, immigration widens international inequalities in the long term, resulting in the accumulation of advantage in the North. The implications of the results are discussed in the context theory and policy on the migration-development nexus.