Labor market change in societies where an information economy is evolving, is acentral area of concern for information society scholars today. While there has beenconsiderable research conducted on cases of developed countries, research on labormarket changes during a transition to an information economy outside of the advancedindustrial economies is scarce. Thus, this dissertation proposes to examine the changes inwage, employment, and occupation structure that take place when an NIC, such asTaiwan, ushers in an information economy, and to explore the reasons behind thesechanges.This dissertation combined the historical, policy, and statistical analyses andconcluded that the transformation from labor intensive manufacturing to an informationintensive economy, as arranged by the Taiwanese government due to its own political and governing purposes, and also in the context of international political and economiccircumstances, determined Taiwan’s economic resource arrangement, which resulted inan increasingly unbalanced labor market in terms of wage distribution, unemployment,and occupation structure. This transformation changed and shaped the structure of thelabor market to benefit workers more skilled with information, more professional, havinghigher level knowledge and a higher level of education, while an increasing amount ofwhite-collar and service workers began earning comparatively low wages. At the sametime the demand for blue-collar and lower skill workers severely declined. Moreover, thetotal labor demand of information manufacturing and information intensive service ismuch less than that of traditional labor intensive manufacturing, resulting in Taiwan’sincreasing unemployment problem. Among these processes, many different social,political, policy, and economic factors interacted and collectively determined this result.Among them, the role of the state in shaping Taiwan’s information economy in general and the labor market situation in particular did matter considerably.
