Blocking the low road, paving the high road? The role of industrial relations and investments in knowledge-based capital for export specialisation trajectories in services

While in the Fordist era industrial relations institutions had been pivotal in fueling growth in manufacturing, their ability to adapt and support an increasingly service-led knowledge economy has been questioned. Using the OECD’s Trade in Value Added dataset, we test how variables that are tied respectively to industrial relations and to education and R&D are connected to export specialisation in less knowledge-intensive services (LKIS) and knowledge-intensive services (KIS). Our regression analysis reveals that lower levels of coordination in industrial relations are associated with higher value added in export shares in the LKIS sector while the effect of these institutions on the KIS sector is mostly neutral. Our analysis finds that investments in knowledge-based capital drive growth in KIS exports, regardless of existing industrial relations institutions. We conclude that coordinated industrial relations institutions block the ‘low road’ of export specialisation while investments in knowledge-based capital pave the ‘high road’ in services.

Meet our speaker

Chiara Benassi is a Senior Visiting Fellow at King's Business School. She joined King's College London as Lecturer in HRM and ESRC Future Research Leader fellow (2016-2018) in October 2016. Previously, she was Lecturer in HRM at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She has held visiting positions at the Free University in Berlin, University of Milan, and Institute for Economic and Social Research in Bologna. Her research investigates how national and local institutions and political-economic contingencies affect human resource strategies in areas such as flexibility, training, and knowledge management. Her work has been published in leading journals, and her research has been funded by the ESRC and Hans Boeckler Foundation. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

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