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The first of three chapters on the implications of electoral politics and the design of political institutions for welfare state adjustment. Swank first provides an overview of two key domestic and international pressures on developed welfare states: domestic fiscal stress and international capital mobility. He then outlines the theoretical argument that democratic institutions fundamentally determine government responses to domestic and international structural change, focusing on formal and informal institutions and drawing on and fusing insights from ‘power resources’ theory, the new institutionalism, and new cultural arguments about the determinants of social policy in advanced capitalist democracies. The next two sections utilize new data on social welfare effort, national political institutions, and internationalization to provide an econometric assessment of the social policy impacts of domestic fiscal stress and capital mobility during the period 1965 to 1995, looking first at the direct impacts of rises in public sector debt and in international capital mobility on social welfare provision, and second at the welfare state effects of fiscal stress and global capital flows across nationally and temporally divergent democratic institutional contexts; the initial focus is on total social welfare effort and then the analysis is shifted to changes in cash income maintenance and social services. The conclusion assesses the implications of the arguments and findings for the future course of social policy in developed democracies, and potentially bolsters the evidence for the central assertion that domestic institutions systematically determine the direction of welfare state restructuring.

Human talent is a key economic resource and a source of creative power in science, technology, business, arts and culture, and other activities. Talent has a large economic value and its mobility has increased with globalization, the spread of new information technologies, and lower transportation costs. Well educated and/or talented people are often more internationally mobile than unskilled workers. Moreover, immigrants with high human capital face more favourable immigration policies in receiving countries; typically high per capita income economies short of information technology experts, scientists, medical doctors, and other types of talent. This chapter reviews analytical and policy issues related to the international mobility of talented individuals. Main types of talent (those engaged in directly productive activities, academic talent, and qualified human resources in the cultural and health sectors) are identified and studied. It also looks at special topics such as the market and social rewards to talent, the relation between formal education and talent, wage convergence and divergence. Critical themes for public policy of this mobility for source and destination countries and for global development are highlighted.

With increasing technological advancements and the trend towards globalization, how can separate psychology professions interconnect, given the fact that they have different cultures, professional training and education, and policies? How can international mobility be possible with the issues surrounding their accountability? The challenge is to devise collaborated list of agreements and policies (mechanisms of accountability) concerning cultural and ethical negotiations, training and education equivalences, and internship requirements across borders that sufficiently accommodates various standards for education, training, and regulations of professional psychology. Although the future has yet to reveal a universal educational standard and regulatory standard, discussions for international mobility are already underway. The current situation in North America, Europe, and Asia provides a foundation for achieving this goal of connecting and sharing expertise.

Together with Chapters 2 and 3, this chapter presents evidence on the interrelation between the mobility of students and of the highly skilled. Especially, it analyzes the effect of international jobmobility on academic career success measured by obtaining an open-ended contract or tenure-track position. A taxonomy of research mobility is developed and its impact on the probability of holding a permanent positionis investigated. The empirical analysis uses an original database that covers experienced researchers in five European countries – France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The analysis confirms that international mobility impacts on career consolidation. The key result, robust to several specifications, is that repeat migrants are the least likely to achieve a permanent position, unless they are more productive than their peers. The country effects indicate that researchers’ career differs substantially within Europe, with German researchers being the least likely to consolidate their career in the long-term.

This chapter surveys the development of international capital mobility since the mid-nineteenth century. It documents the long U traced out by the creation of a well-integrated global capital market by 1914, its collapse during the interwar years, and its resurrection since 1970. This description is enhanced by reference to the open-economy “trilemma” faced by policymakers when choosing between capital markets, domestic monetary targets, and exchange rate regimes. The chapter examines a wide array of new evidence, including data on gross asset stocks, interest rate arbitrage, real interest differentials, and equity-return differentials. On all measures examined, the degree of international capital mobility appears to follow this U pattern, being high before World War I, low in the Great Depression, and high today. A commentary is also included at the end of the chapter.

This chapter considers capital flows and a growing controversy among economists. In the past, the author was a strong proponent of international capital mobility—the free flow of investment financing from one country to another. He and others like him believed in freeing up capital flows to encourage large-scale lending from the world's rich countries to the world's poor countries. Such lending, they hoped, might cut a generation off the time it otherwise would have taken developing countries' economies to catch up to the industrial structures and living standards of wealthier nations. Today, however, it is much harder for him to support untrammeled international capital mobility. He is no longer as sure that capital flows are efficient. Worse yet, even if capital flows are efficient, it seems increasingly likely that these flows could benefit rich people from poor countries at the expense of the countries themselves—including their poor.

It seems the world of psychology is divided. Policies and implementations of professional psychology education, training, and practice differ in various regions of the globe, and qualifications for psychologists vary by country. This limits international mobility, unless the standards of one country can adapt to another country's standards. The need for doctoral training, the need for the appropriate degree to be awarded, the characteristics of a good training program and internship, the requirements for licensure, the form and value of continuing education, and the impact of relicensing procedures are just among the few issues that can be empirically scrutinized. It is imperative to address these issues and have a rational procedure, self-regulation, and attention given to the public. This chapter discusses the development stages of professional psychologists, particularly in America and in Canada, from professional training to internship, postdoctoral experience to licensure; each discussion here contains a summary of programs, training approaches, accreditation, and quality assurance.

This chapter looks at the language of medicine, at communication in the various spheres of healthcare, and more specifically at the use of language in these settings. The first part outlines the current state of healthcare communication, highlighting some of its key features: the impact of the new technological affordances, the mobility of healthcare professionals, the tension between tradition and innovation, the issue of health literacy. Healthcare professionals are expert insiders and their language choice can depend on the different communicative situations and contexts. Moreover, there are different medical text types and different levels of discourse. The chapter then focuses on some more specific aspects of language choice and communication in healthcare, examining the stylistic features of a number of healthcare texts, such as patient information leaflets, and the importance of case studies in medical discourse. Finally, it presents an analysis of how opposition, for example the risk vs. protection antithesis, is used in international healthcare insurance discourse.

Chapter six discusses how different family models— joint, nuclear, transnational, among others—are linked to class mobility among Nambudiri migrant families. The question of the relation between family size, sterilization and citizenship is analysed to show how sticking to the ‘one-child’ model is made meaningful by referring to a wider colonial history of family reproduction and creates dilemmas in the present. The chapter discusses how histories of procreation, childbirth, and care are recalled to illustrate the progressive move from a sterile community to a responsible community. While the sterile community describes a colonial past in which few Nambudiri children were born or accepted due to orthodox kinship norms, the responsible community accepts the sacrifice represented by sterilization in order to achieve models of modern motherhood and fatherhood. Changing family sizes, if combined with generational forms of migration, also produces anxieties among middle-class families on elderly and children care.