Great European Crisis: Shift or Turning Point in Job Creation from Job Destruction

Abstract

The new century globalization in trade and finance—both between euro area and other world economic areas and within euro zone—quickens the pace of “creative destruction” and thereby speeds the flow of technology across European countries. In a previous work, we proposed the category of labor as a product opposed to labor as a factor of production. Coexisting forms of labor in societies range from an upper class, the labor product class, to different types of post-Fordist labor, where, notwithstanding the intensity of technology, labor input is declining. Have the 2008–2014 crises and the delays in the reforms of institutional architecture shifted or modified the long term trends? This paper describes a naive model of diverse forms of labor substitution developed using certain rules, which proved fruitful in describing the substitution of primary energy sources (constrained logistic functions). The model is used to answer the question and to measure the structural gaps between four different EU countries (Germany, Spain, France and Italy) compared to the UK economy.