Labour Mobility in the Asia-Pacific Region

Driven by demographic changes, and reinforced by intensifying globalization, international labour mobility has been on the rise in recent decades in the Asia-Pacific region. It seems that, after trade and investment, labor mobility constitutes the final frontier for regional integration among the Asia-Pacific economies. There is no doubt that labor movements are integral to regional economic integration and critical to the long-term health of the regional economies and business operations. In reality, however, such movements are much burdened with political and social problems in the labor origin economies as well as the labor destination economies, and yet many of these problems remain not just unaddressed by the relevant governments but not even well studied. The present volume seeks to fill this gap by offering synthesis papers stemming from the studies on international labor migration in twenty Asia-Pacific economies which were discussed at a joint PECC-ABAC conference held in Seoul, Korea, on 25-26 March 2008, organized by KOPEC. These papers examine the demographic transition, the associated pattern of international labor migration, the national policies associated with it as well as their implications for business and the issues they raise, and, finally, the implications of these analysis for cooperation among the APEC governments, for each of the four sub-regions in the Asia-Pacific, as well as for the whole region.