The Social Politics of Global Competitiveness

This chapter documents the codification of the politics of global competitiveness in core documents published by the OECD and the World Bank in 2019 and 2020: the OECD’s Employment Outlook 2019: The Future of Work, and the World Bank’s World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work, and World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains. These documents confirm the commitment of the two institutions, even after the major setback arising from the global financial crisis originating a decade earlier, to a global regime of competitiveness in labour and product markets, underpinned by policies aiming at the distribution of production around the world in accordance with the maximisation of profits, and a constant focus on the development of productivity-enhancing skills. They develop further the need to move away from inflexible and costly labour contracts, and argue for a common system of labour regulation and forms of social protection that incentivise paid work, and selective deregulation to boost the transfer of workers from the informal economy to the formal sector.