Labor Embodied in Trade

Global production chains carry environmental and socioeconomic impacts embodied in each traded good and service. Even though labor and energy productivities tend to be higher for domestic production in high‐income countries than those in emerging economies, this difference is significantly reduced for consumption, when including imported products to satisfy national demand. The analysis of socioeconomic and environmental aspects embodied in consumption can shed a light on the real level of productivity of an economy, as well as the effects of rising imports and offshoring. This research introduces a consumption‐based metric for productivity, in which we evaluate the loss of productivity of developed nations resulting from imports from less‐developed economies and offshoring of labor‐intensive production. We measure the labor, energy, and greenhouse gas emissions footprints in the European Union's trade with the rest of the world through a multiregional input‐output model. We confirm that the labor footprint of European imports is significantly higher than the one of exports, mainly from low‐skilled, labor‐intensive primary sectors. A high share of labor embodied in exports is commonly associated with low energy productivities in domestic industries. Hence, this reconfirms that the offshoring of production to cheaper and low‐skilled, labor‐abundant countries offsets, or even reverts, energy efficiency gains and climate‐change mitigation actions in developed countries.     

Vom Klostergarten ins Labor

Changing the genetic setup of plants The history of mankind is closely linked to the success in domesticating plants and animals, while in the beginning – in the “naive era of plant biology” – the successes in changing the genetic setup of plants towards the adaptation of plants to human needs were slow, the re‐discovery of Mendelian rules initiated the era of scientific breeding, culminating in the “green revolution”. Recently, however, classical breeding for the major crop species reached a ceiling as required traits, i.e. resistances against biotic and abiotic stresses could not be found within the crossable gene pools, so novel approaches like genetic engineering were applied to tap foreign gene pools in order to widen the existing gene pools. Some examples are illustrated and discussed in order to create awareness that not the methodology is what is counting, but the result. In that aspect, all agricultural practices have to be compared in order their respective contribution to secure the necessary production increases to feed an ever growing human population.