The poor unemployed may be a new labour pool, but companies may not find them all that useful.
Jim Hosking, a daffodil farmer, has found that as unemployment has dropped in Cornwall, the local labour pool has dried up.
That is because they are seeing their incomes rise in real terms and there is strong demand for workers in a shrinking labour pool.
BBC: Viewpoint: Why 8% may not be the magic number for China
Other countries have also rung up hefty bills since the 2008 financial crash, but are at a much later stage of development than China, which faces a middle-income trap as its cheap labour pool dries up.
FORBES: Temper China Growth Expectations, Says CLSA Cheerleader
They create a class of illegal workers (but this seems a bonus from the perspective of employers who want an exploitable labour-pool).
Mind you big box stores are still labour intensive, the only difference is, instead of a lot of people owning and running their own stores one entity owns and runs the place with low-skilled labour from the pool of people who have been run out of business.
Others could have done better by moving their operations abroad, where a wider pool of labour is available.
To tap such a pool of labour would require more radical tax and labour-market reforms than most governments are contemplating.
Traditionally, productivity growth has slowed as expansions have matured, with firms obliged to draw less-skilled workers from the depleted pool of labour.
ECONOMIST: In due course it will stop. Until then, one stands in awe
In its wake foreign firms piled into industries such as consumer goods and carmaking, drawn by a big pool of labour and customers.
The capitalist enclaves would reach so deeply into the country's pool of labour that the remaining supply of farmers, traders, dockworkers and bag-carriers would fall short of demand.
However, wages are held back by a large pool of surplus labour, and China's partially convertible currency is pegged to the dollar.
Moreover, the large numbers of people passing through the scheme and gaining experience of work would enlarge the pool of employable labour.
If the pool of unused labour (including those who choose not to have jobs as well as the officially unemployed) could be put to work, Europe's economies would temporarily jump ahead.
Labour councillor Ron Stone said a pool had been needed in the East Bristol area since a previous one shut in 2005.
Indian entrepreneurs, who can draw on a large pool of English-speaking labour at much lower than western wages, have spotted an opportunity here, too.
Farming, construction and health care in the southern states, which rely on migrant labour (documented or otherwise), will have a smaller pool from which to recruit.
ECONOMIST: Mexico's population: When the ni?os run out | The
The pool, built during the depression of the early 1930s by out-of-work voluntary labour, attracts around 2, 000 visits each summer.
Other bright ideas include getting local firms to pool information on new markets and to work more actively on fixing problems such as shortages of skilled labour.
ECONOMIST: Fashions are changing in the inward-investment business
应用推荐