Sponsored By:


1:00 pm
Symposia #1

Maxwell Auditorium, first floor Maxwell Hall

On and Off Shoring:
The Growing Challenges of Globally Mobile Workers and Workplaces


Questions

(1) What would you identify as the most important trend in cross-border mobility of finance, workers, and workplaces that is not yet adequately understood by the American public?

(2) Some globalization enthusiasts claim that in the long run “it’s all good on average,” including financial globalization and cross-border movement of corporate operations and personnel. Where do you stand on this claim? Are there important differences between the “new” forms of cross-border transactions and traditional merchandise trade? What differences? Why are the differences important? Is the distribution of global integration’s gains and burdens across American society different than it used to be? How different? Why?

(3) How has the global fluidity of financial capital, including venture capital, contributed to the growing cross-border mobility of workers and workplaces? Comment on the prospects, as you see them, for freer cross-border competition for venture capital and in the “market” for corporate control (mergers and acquisitions), and on the implications for the other concerns of this symposium. What effects would national and global policy innovation (e.g., corporate reporting reform, global sovereign-debt-restructuring rules) have on these trends and correlations?

(4) In important service activities such as banking and finance; insurance and re-insurance; architectural, engineering, and software design, is it still meaningful to talk about workplaces? And if so, why does it matter where such services are produced, granting, of course, that free global access to their use as inputs undoubtedly enhances global productivity?

(5) In 2001 nearly 35 percent of New York’s Gross State Product (GSP) came from the finance/insurance/real-estate (FIRE) sector; the FIRE share for the rest of the United States was a little below 20 percent. Presuming that you agree that this makes the concerns of this Symposium especially interesting to us New York residents, are the concerns mostly threats or mostly opportunities?

(6) Some have argued that the key to continued American technology-driven growth is its openness to temporary and permanent in-migration of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, and graduate students. What do you think of that conjecture? Are US security and other concerns going to alter these trends, especially when they are not matched abroad?

(7) For the World Bank’s group of Low [lowest] Income countries, workers’ remittances in 2001 exceeded foreign aid, were double the size of inward direct investment, and were more than six times as large as financial inflows. Is this pattern likely to continue for low-income countries; to grow? What issues does it pose for both source and host? What security and money-laundering issues might it raise?

(8) Some commentators think that the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round will fail to liberalize any form of services trade unless the rich countries of the world are prepared to liberalize “Mode 4 services delivery” (Mode 4 is temporary cross-border movement of designated types of workers). What do you think about that forecast? Will the rich countries make any such concessions (given the US Congress’s “NO” to what they characterize as unsavory mixing of trade issues with immigration issues)?

(9) Are you willing to speculate on what Pat Moynihan might say about all these trends, and on what creative “policy margin” he might energetically embark if he were still with us today? (Among other policy margins, for example, he might have pithy things to say about American education, corporate taxation, and global regulatory initiatives).