This book aims to compare and analyze the changes and recent trends of ALMPs in OECD countries and explain the politics of job creation in shaping those changes. The main puzzle explains the different pathways of job creation before and after the 2008 economic crisis. It will quantitatively explore cross-national variations in total expenditures and changes in the distribution of spending on the different types of ALMPs over time. It also examines several potential causal factors to explain the factors that resulted in differences in the expenditures on ALMPs, including partisan control, bargaining system, union density, and neoliberal influence. It argues that these OECD countries may be more likely to enter the low-road policies of short-term job creation instead of the high-road, such as training and human development policies. The case study of Sweden, Germany, and Korea analyzes how and why domestic partisan politics shaped the type of ALMPs adopted. It concludes that variations on the expenditures of ALMPs in these OECD countries were more specific and conditional per the politics of job creation in each country.
Deputy Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at Korea University, received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Korea University with a dissertation titled "Neo-liberal Structural Reforms and Changes in the Labor Market Institutions in Korea." He has worked as a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Unification Studies, a Research Fellow at the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education & Training, and an Administrative Officer in the Office of the President. Afterward, he obtained a second Ph.D. in Political Science from Kent State University, specializing in Policy Administration and Analysis.
His main research areas include laborology, employment and job, social policies, innovation clusters, and entrepreneurship ecosystems. His research includes "The Politics of Job Creation in Economic Crisis: A Comparative Analysis of Active Labor Market Policies in the OECD Countries" and DJ Government's Restructuring and the Labor Market (BAIKSAN Publishing House.). He has also co-authored books such as Regional Innovation Systems in the World (Hanwool Academy), Secondary Regular Employment in the Financial Industry, Collective Bargaining in Public Institutions (BAIKSAN Publishing House.), Innovation and Evolution of ICT Clusters(Hanwool Academy), Labor Market and National Competitiveness, and Wage System in Public Institutions (BAIKSAN Publishing House.).