Demand for Low-skilled Workers across Europe: Between Formal Qualifications and Non-cognitive Skills
Lucia Kurekova, Slovak Governance Institute
(Joint paper with Miroslav Beblavy & Corina Haita)
This paper seeks to understand what role labor and skill regime played in the growth and technological advancement of the software and automotive industries in semi-core CEE countries. Slovakia and Czech Republic have been very successful in developing both automotive and software industries. While the success - defined as move up-market in the complexity of a given production (automotive) and/or gaining of a dominant and relatively stable share in the world market (software industry) \\\" of both sectors can be linked to a handful of automotive and software companies, the trajectories of sectoral growth and development are fundamentally different. Foremost, the sectors differ in their ownership structure. While the automotive emerged and grew vastly mainly through foreign investment in the CEE countries, the internalization of software firms - both in terms of establishment of bases abroad and as per hiring of non-nationals into the key managing and R&D positions - was a mark of maturity of these companies and is a characteristic of their success. This raises important questions with respect to the dynamic relationship between the localization of production and localization of people, which strategy prevails under what conditions and what results it generates in terms of technological advancement.