The political economy of the service transition / edited by Anne Wren.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : The political economy of post-industrial societies / Anne Wren -- A political-institutional model of real exchange rates, competitiveness, and the division of labor / Torben Iversen and David Soskice -- The trilemma revisited : institutions, inequality, and employment creation in an era of ICT-intensive service expansion / Anne Wren, Máté Fodor, and Sotiria Theodoropoulou -- The service transition and women's employment / Moira Nelson and John D. Stephens -- Pathways of change in CMEs : training regimes in Germany and the Netherlands / Karen M. Anderson and Anke Hassel -- A tale of two trilemmas : varieties of higher education and the service economy / Ben Ansell and Jane Gingrich -- De-industrialization and the expansion of the welfare state : a reassessment / Philip Manow, Kees van Kersbergen, and Gijs Schumacher -- Service expansion, international exposure, and political preferences / Anne Wren and Philipp Rehm -- The political economy of working time and redistribution / Lucy Barnes -- The political economy of gender in service sector economies / Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth.

Over the past four decades the wealthiest OECD economies-in Europe, North America, and Australasia- have faced massive structural change. Industrial sectors, which were once considered the economic backbone of these societies, have shrunk inexorably in terms of size and economic significance, while service sectors have taken over as the primary engines of output and employment expansion. The impact on labor markets has been profound: in many OECD countries more than three-quarters of employment is now in services, while industrial sectors, on average, account for less than one-fifth.

This sectoral shift in the locus of economic activity has potentially radical implications for politics and society. However, these implications are only beginning to be understood. This path-breaking book is a systematic attempt to understand the distinct political economy of service societies. It examines how different types of socio-economic regimes manage the service transition, with a central focus on job creation and destruction and the changing characteristics of labor markets, and shows that the economic, distributional, and political outcomes with which it is associated vary across countries depending on their political-institutional structures.