A vast, cheap labour force could go to work on road improvements, rainwater reservoirs, irrigation channels, dykes and community centres.
That flow largely ceased after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, when Japanese firms began to focus on China's vast, cheap labour force.Yet with labour costs now steadily rising in China, and political tensions between Japan and China continuing to flare, South-East Asia looks attractive again.
If so, the economy may have created a vast reserve labour force, akin to the "spinsters" of early 19th-century Britain single women who were paid piece rates for spinning textiles at home or the dockers who used to mass outside port gates in the hope of being selected for a day's work.
The emergence of China and India, with their vast, cheap labour forces, has weighed on labour costs in the West, as well as keeping a lid on inflation and interest rates.
What is noteworthy about many of them is that the root of their success is not India's obvious competitive advantage: its vast, low-cost labour force.
The level of research and development by foreign car firms in India is still puny, but in time that should come too.What India does not seem to give foreign firms is a clear-cut cost arbitrage over other places in the world, despite its vast and cheap labour force.
Social security (old age, disability, and survivor pensions, and other monetary benefits) covers the vast majority of the labour force.
The state's manufacturing sector employs some one-seventh of the labour force, the vast majority of whom work in the factories of Melbourne and Geelong and in the coalfield centres of the Latrobe Valley.
The looming "demographic cliff" will see vast numbers of skilled workers dispatched from the labour force.
Based on our sample of immigrants from the Spanish Labour Force Survey (1999 2007) and according to the figures in Table 1, the vast majority of immigrants in these regions are primarily Latinos (52.3%).
