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Published November 21, 2020 | Version In press, corrected proof
Journal article Open

The international division of labor and embodied working time in trade for the US, the EU and China

  • 1. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
  • 2. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona & ICREA

Description

In sustainability analysis, human time is a crucial and overlooked societal limit. Some core countries overcome their time budgets and preserve their socio-economic structures by using energy and importing working time embodied in products and services. This paper analyses the roles of the United States, the European Union, and China in the international division of labor using the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) framework. We calculated working time in production, consumption, and trade both in absolute and per capita terms, for the different economic subsectors in 2011. Energy Metabolic Rates (energy use per hour) and Economic Job Productivity (value-added per hour) complemented the analysis. Whereas the greatest share of the workforce in China was still in agriculture, the US and EU had it in the tertiary sectors by outsourcing large shares of agriculture, mining, and industry: they import about half of the labor time in their consumption. At the global level, the trade of embodied labor is a zero-sum game. This fact questions the long-term viability of the current pattern of development enjoyed by the EU and the US, as well as the possibility for emerging economies to complete a similar transition to a post-industrial economy.

Notes

This research was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No. 689669 (MAGIC) and No. 649342 (EUFORIE). Laura Pérez-Sánchez gratefully acknowledges financial support of the Catalan administration/AGAUR (Grant number: 2019FI_B01317). The authors also acknowledge financial support by the government of Catalonia (AGAUR), through the support for research groups (2017-SGR-230), and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, through the "María de Maeztu" program for Units of Excellence (CEX2019-000940-M). This work reflects only the authors' view; the funding agencies cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

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Additional details

Related works

Is supplemented by
10.5281/zenodo.4293943 (DOI)

Funding

MAGIC – Moving Towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: Informing Nexus Security 689669
European Commission
EUFORIE – European Futures for Energy Efficiency 649342
European Commission