Should Expatriates be Paid According to Local Living Costs?

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What are the major HR issues that must be addressed as an organization moves from an international, to a multinational, to a global, and to a transnational form?

Much more than any other previous influence, globalization is emphasising the importance of HRM to industrialization and economic development in the region. It is creating new challenges for, as well as highlighting old tensions among, governments and the social partners. It has also brought with it a number of strategic opportunities, if the parties can take advantage of them, to improve the prospects of enterprises and workers and to position the region for a period of continuing strong economic growth and development into the twenty-first century.
Employers, as the force driving economic changes, and their organizations have to take the initiative to develop a reform agenda which can deliver these benefits. This will require a strategy directed to improving employment relations and which seeks changes in attitudes and behaviour in the workplace and addresses the key issues of skills development, compensation, work organization and flexibility, and cross-cultural management.
These requirements are placing considerable demands on employers and their enterprises to develop and implement new strategies, structures and processes. There is an increasingly strategic role for industrial relations (IR) within the enterprise, as much of what has to be done involves significant changes to traditional practices in this and the related area of human resource management (HRM). The result has been that the nature of HRM is changing in many enterprises. A new approach is emerging, relying on a broader concept of employment relations.
This new approach is based on a range of HRM and HRM practices directed to improving the flexibility and skills of the workforce, within an environment which emphasises communication, cooperation and trust between managers, workers and their representatives. Adoption of this approach, however, has been neither universal nor uniform. It has been particularly pronounced in industrialised countries, and is increasing in industrialising countries. But both the forms it has taken and its spread, has varied considerably within industries and across regions in the same country, and among countries and regions having different industrial relations policy, legal and institutional frameworks and traditions.
Within this new economic and industrial environment, the situation in Asia and the Pacific presents a range of contrasts - from the generally strong but variable economic performance of the advanced countries in North, East and Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific, to the rapidly industrializing countries in Southeast Asia, the accelerating growth in South Asia, and the special situations of the countries in transition and the island states of the South Pacific.

To date, many Asian and ...