Labor?eliminating technology, wage inequality, and trade protectionism

Wage inequality, technology, and trade

Recent widening of the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers has been attributed mainly to skill-biased-technical-change and to trade liberalization. This paper examines the effects of the two in a unified model, in which trade and technology adoption are endogenous. The paper has two main results. First, technical progress increases the wage gap in developed and in less developed coun...

Trade, Technology, and China’s Wage Inequality

China experienced a sharp increase in wage inequality between unskilled and skilled workers in the late 1990s. Using a sample of 1,500 firms in five Chinese cities with available data for 1998 and 2000, we investigate the role of technology and foreign trade in determining China’s wage inequality. We find evidence that conditional on the technology deployed, trade reduces wage inequality in exp...

Trade, Technology and U.K. Wage Inequality*

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth. Then we relate price and TFP changes to a set of underlying factors. Among a number of results, we find ...

Wage Inequality, Technology and Institutions

Trade, growth and wage inequality in Bangladesh

Using model selection techniques based on out-of-sample predictive ability criterion in a Vector Autoregression (VAR) framework, this paper empirically examines the causal relations among growth, trade, and wage inequality in Bangladesh between 1971 and 2000. There is some evidence of bi-directional causality between growth and inequality and between trade and growth. That growth causes trade a...