The global production of goods and services is currently facing new constraints: the existence of highly populated countries with high productive potential (China, India in particular), the scarcity of resources to which the circular economy only contributes an imperfect answer, a very abundant workforce of unequal qualifications. The combination of these factors generates an international productive model which tends to polarize production in a few countries and weakens the demand for labor in many territories, in particular, those characterized by high labor costs, often also penalized by serious inefficiencies in education and continuing training. In addition, this productive model is subject to stronger public regulation in terms of compliance with environmental rules and a resurgence of protectionist national policies that may be advantageous in the case of the "large country", but such measures do not undermine its operating logic capitalist market economy. The new and worrying fact concerns the social question which is becoming major in societies unprepared for endemic situations of underemployment in which a new segmentation of the labor market considerably increases the weight of unskilled or poorly qualified populations. Public regulation is needed to prevent the growth of inequalities and monetary poverty, the induced effects of which cause considerable costs, in particular in terms of the health and safety of goods and people. Several corrective scenarios are possible and can relate upstream to a better match of training to the needs of the economy and downstream, to the correction through more or less accentuated redistribution policies, the establishment of a universal income by being the most controversial but arguably the most inescapable form. The purpose of this special issue of the journal would be to study the characteristics of this constrained and non-cooperative international productive model generating crowding out effects between States (opposition United States - China, for example) or within States between workers according to their degree of effective qualification. The issue will be split into three analytical stages: the first pertaining to the characterization of the new international productive system (three articles), the second analyzing national strategies for productive adaptation based on increased performance of human capital, an objective which has been unequally achieved by educational systems of varying efficiency depending on the country (three articles) and the third studying the modalities of new regulation of underemployment, differentiating them according to the market economy model practiced with a role of the State more or less interventionist (three articles).