Labor market change in societies where an information economy is evolving, is a
central area of concern for information society scholars today. While there has been
considerable research conducted on cases of developed countries, research on labor
market changes during a transition to an information economy outside of the advanced
industrial economies is scarce. Thus, this dissertation proposes to examine the changes in
wage, employment, and occupation structure that take place when an NIC, such as
Taiwan, ushers in an information economy, and to explore the reasons behind these
changes.
This dissertation combined the historical, policy, and statistical analyses and
concluded that the transformation from labor intensive manufacturing to an information
intensive economy, as arranged by the Taiwanese government due to its own political and governing purposes, and also in the context of international political and economic
circumstances, determined Taiwan’s economic resource arrangement, which resulted in
an increasingly unbalanced labor market in terms of wage distribution, unemployment,
and occupation structure. This transformation changed and shaped the structure of the
labor market to benefit workers more skilled with information, more professional, having
higher level knowledge and a higher level of education, while an increasing amount of
white-collar and service workers began earning comparatively low wages. At the same
time the demand for blue-collar and lower skill workers severely declined. Moreover, the
total labor demand of information manufacturing and information intensive service is
much less than that of traditional labor intensive manufacturing, resulting in Taiwan’s
increasing unemployment problem. Among these processes, many different social,
political, policy, and economic factors interacted and collectively determined this result.
Among them, the role of the state in shaping Taiwan’s information economy in general and the labor market situation in particular did matter considerably. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6587 |
| Date | 21 October 2009 |
| Creators | Wang, Wei-ching |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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