Why Economic Growth May Not Require Local Labor: Channel-Based Configurations in Contemporary Cities

Certain high-growth cities exhibit a persistent gap between aggregate economic performance and the labor security of their resident populations. Existing literatures have addressed this observation under various rubrics—global city stratification, precarious labor markets, financialized urbanism—yet these frameworks tend to interpret such gaps as distortions of an otherwise labor-absorptive growth process, rather than as outcomes of a structurally distinct growth logic. This paper offers an analytical re-specification by distinguishing between two growth logics: production-based growth, in which wealth accumulation is tied to local labor organization, and channel-based growth, in which wealth accrues through the facilitation of value flows that originate and terminate elsewhere. This distinction clarifies why economic expansion may proceed without structural reference to resident labor participation. The paper specifies the mechanism through which channel-based configurations delimit labor necessity and situates this argument within debates in urban studies and cultural political economy. The analytical usefulness of this framework lies in reframing growth-labor decoupling not as a policy failure, but as an indication that the growth process itself may be structurally indifferent to local labor absorption.