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(english) Core labour standards defined by the ILO in 1998 are universal, but applied very differently across countries. Compliance is much higher in high income countries. However, the causality between improved labour standards and economic growth remains a controversial issue. Export-led growth strategies might encourage developing countries to curb the process of standards improvement. In this way, they can raise the volume of their unskilled labour endowments (child and/or forced labour) in order to strengthen their comparative advantage over compliant countries and pursue "social dumping" strategies, which aim more directly at increasing competitiveness. We use a gravity model to assess the trade impact of curbing the level of compliance with core labour standards, distinguishing the effects on bilateral trade (geographical specialization) from the multilateral effects on all exports and imports. We show that, other things being equal, countries that meet the labour standards tend to trade more with each other, while non-compliant countries tend to trade more with compliant countries. These effects are identified mainly with respect to child labour and freedom of association. All other things being equal, countries that meet the labour standards tend to be less open than non-compliant countries, but differently depending on the standards, with a non-linear relationship for some of them. Less compliant countries, frequently the poorest ones, may simultaneously step up their trade and labour standards. For median countries, mainly the emerging countries, the level of compliance with labour standards is “optimal” from a mercantilist point of view. For the most compliant countries, the developed ones, their strict compliance with labour standards implies a trade shortfall. _________________________________ (français) Les normes de travail fondamentales définies par l'OIT en 1998 sont universelles, mais différemment appliquées dans les pays. Leur respect est beaucoup plus élevé dans les pays à haut revenu. Toutefois, la causalité entre l'amélioration des normes de travail et la croissance reste un sujet débattu. Les stratégies de croissance par les exportations pourraient encourager les pays en développement à ralentir le processus d'amélioration des normes. Ils peuvent ainsi accroître leur dotation relative en travail non qualifié (travail des enfants et/ou forcé) pour renforcer leurs avantages comparatifs par rapport aux pays qui les respectent et poursuivre des politiques dites de "dumping social" qui visent encore plus directement à accroître leur compétitivité. Nous utilisons un modèle de gravité pour évaluer l'impact du commerce sur le respect des normes fondamentales de travail en séparant les effets sur le commerce bilatéral (spécialisation géographique) des effets sur l'ouverture multilatérale. Nous montrons que, toutes choses égales par ailleurs, les pays qui respectent les normes de travail tendent à échanger davantage entre eux alors que les pays qui ne les respectent pas tendent à échanger davantage avec les pays qui les respectent. Ces effets sont particulièrement nets avec le travail des enfants et la liberté d'association. Les pays qui respectent les normes de travail tendent à être moins ouverts que les pays qui ne les respectent pas, mais avec des différences selon les normes avec une relation non linéaire pour certaines d'entre elles. Les pays qui les respectent le moins, généralement les plus pauvres, améliorent simultanément leur commerce et leurs normes. Pour les pays intermédiaires en terme de respect des normes, principalement les pays émergents, le niveau de respect des normes de travail est “optimal” d'un point de vue mercantiliste. Pour les pays les plus respectueux, ce niveau élevé de normes conduit à réduire leur commerce.

International audience; We propose a theory that rising globalization and rising wage inequality are related because trade liberalization raises the demand facing highly competitive skill-intensive firms. In our model, only the lowest-cost firms participate in the global economy exactly along the lines of Melitz (2003). In addition to differing in their productivity, firms differ in their skill intensity. We model skill-biased technology as a correlation between skill intensity and technological acumen, and we estimate this correlation to be large using firm-level data from Chile in 1995. A fall in trade costs leads to both greater trade volumes and an increase in the relative demand for skill, as the lowest-cost/most-skilled firms expand to serve the export market while less skill-intensive non-exporters retrench in the face of increased import competition. This mechanism works regardless of factor endowment differences, so we provide an explanation for why globalization and wage inequality move together in both skill-abundant and skill-scarce countries. In our model countries are net exporters of the services of their abundant factor, but there are no Stolper-Samuelson effects because import competition affects all domestic firms equally.

Several empirical studies have shown that the effect of openness on the gender wage gap depends on the skill requirement of the workplace. This paper offers a theoretical explanation to understand that finding. We integrate a statistical discrimination framework with the labour assignment approach to give general conditions under which the matching between firms and workers gives rise to a wider gender wage gap at the upper tail of the distribution, in accordance with empirical evidence. We further look at the effect of trade openness on the gender wage gap along the entire distribution. Workers' characteristics vary in two dimensions, skills and job commitment. The inability to observe individual's job commitment induces employers to base partly their decision on group average. Following the literature on labour and international trade, we assume that skills act as complements to technological upgrading. Exporting firms are more skill-intensive and pay higher wages ; assuming further that worker's job commitment is a complement to technological upgrading, we find that a reduction in trade costs increases wage inequality within-groups and has non-monotonic effects on between-group inequality. Trade openness reduces the gender wage gap among unskilled workers but increases the gender wage gap among high-skill workers.

We analyze the impact of labour market rigidities on tax competition betweentwo imperfectly integrated countries. Following a shift from a competitive to a unionizedlabour market in both countries, the capital tax can be adjusted upward in the countrywith the less rigid labour market, whereas the capital tax is always adjusted downward inthe other country. Moreover, by reducing the labour cost differential between countries,trade liberalization gives rise to tax and welfare convergences. Finally, when a countryadopts a flexible labour market, the unionized country may attract the majority of capital., Nous analysons l’impact des rigidités salariales sur la concurrence fiscale entre deux pays imparfaitement intégrés. La formation de syndicats engendre une baisse du taux d’imposition des sociétés dans le pays où les rigidités salariales sont les plus fortes alors que l’imposition des sociétés peut augmenter dans l’autre pays. De plus, la libéralisation commerciale, en réduisant la différence de coûts salariaux entre pays, se traduit par une convergence des niveaux d’imposition et de bien-être. Enfin, en présence de syndicats dans un seul des deux pays, ce dernier peut attirer la majorité des capitaux.

(english) The starting point of this paper is given by country situations where trade liberalization is expected to be poverty and inequality alleviating in the long run while inducing a short run increase in poverty or in inequality. The question we ask is what are the distributive aspects of trade which are worth documenting to better help governments integrate trade policies within a global policy framework so as to enhance growth and reduce poverty and inequality. The method followed is a literature review, organized according to three different acceptations of fairness implied by the “Development” objective of world trade liberalization agenda. A “pro-development” trade liberalization agenda should first correct past unfairness in trade regime, which raises the broad issue of country level trade liberalization’s ex post impact assessment. It should equally reduce poverty, which points toward household level assessment. Last, because development is basically a dynamic process, the distributive-dynamic effects of trade liberalization are also considered. Across all these three definitions of fairness, the development objective of the Doha round proves to be an objective which trade liberalization cannot systematically achieve. A synthesis of our ten main results concludes the paper. _________________________________ (français) Nous dressons dans ce papier un bilan de la littérature sur le lien empirique entre libéralisation commerciale et développement selon trois acceptions différentes du « développement » et de l’impératif de justice que ce terme sous-entend dans les négociations à l’OMC. Rebaptisé « cycle du développement », le cycle de Doha a la première ambition de corriger des injustices passées en matière d’accès au marché, dont ont pâti les pays en développement. Les évaluations ex post et transversales de la libéralisation sur ces pays sont mobilisées pour documenter ce grief. Le cycle de Doha doit également contribuer à réduire la pauvreté des ménages. Les évaluations au niveau des ménages sont ici mobilisées et leurs résultats saillants recensés. Enfin, parce que le « développement » est avant tout un processus, les effets dynamiques de la libéralisation sur les inégalités intertemporelles sont passés en revue. Il ressort de ces trois grandes définitions qu’aucun effet systématique de la libéralisation ne s’observe sur le développement. Ce résultat pourrait expliquer, en partie, la difficulté que rencontrent les négociations à l’OMC dans un cycle au nom chargé de promesses intenables si l’on se restreint à l’état de la connaissance économique sur la question.

This paper takes issue with Paul Krugman's claim that the New Economic Geography should be considered ‘now middle-aged’. The New Economic Geography can be updated to account for current developments in advanced economies, notably innovation-driven agglomeration and urbanization. The New Economic Geography also needs improvement in its ability to address dynamic processes and causal forces in spatial economics. These updates would require that the New Economic Geography breaks some of its self-imposed theoretical and methodological shackles. This in turn would entail achieving a better balance between economists' love for parsimony and geographers' thirst for complexity. Economics itself offers some clues as to how to succeed in this task. Thus updated, the New Economic Geography could present a compelling approach to innovation-driven agglomeration and specialization in the advanced countries, as well as the development of regions in emerging economies.

Classification JEL : F11, F16, D30; This article reassesses the link between international trade and income distribution. We argue that one way to assess the influence of international trade upon income distribution is to take account of each country's specific trade patterns by measuring the changes in the factor content of trade. The econometric specification is based on changes in Gini indices (over non-overlapping four-year intervals), computed exclusively from series drawn from the same source. Our results show that a change in the factor content of trade has a significant impact on income distribution. The sign and magnitude of this impact is conditional on the national income level. We find that an increase in the labor content of trade raises income inequality in poor countries, but reduces it in rich countries (the reverse is true for the capital content of trade). In particular, we show that in the 1980s and 1990s, international trade may have contributed significantly to widening income inequalities in developing countries.

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization and international trade on household income inequality and poverty using detailed micro-data across Brazilian states, from 1987 to 2005. Results suggest that Brazilian states that were more exposed to tariff cuts experienced smaller reductions in household poverty and inequality. If significance of results on Brazilian states depends on the choice of poverty and inequality indicators, robust and contrasting results emerge when we disaggregate into rural and urban areas within states. Trade liberalization contributes to poverty and inequality increases in urban areas and may be linked to inequality declines in rural areas (no significant effect is found for rural poverty). In terms of observed integration to world markets, import penetration plays a similar role as trade liberalization for Brazilian states as a whole. On the contrary, rising export exposure appears to have significantly reduced both measures of household welfare., Cet article étudie l'impact de la libéralisation commerciale et du commerce international sur les inégalités de revenu et le niveau de pauvreté des ménages au sein des états brésiliens, à partir de données individuelles sur la période 1987-2005. D'après l'étude économétrique, les états brésiliens, davantage touchés par la libéralisation commerciale, ont connu de plus faibles réductions des inégalités ou de la pauvreté. Pour les états brésiliens dans leur ensemble, la significativité des résultats dépend du choix des indicateurs de pauvreté et d'inégalité mais dès lors que l'on distingue les zones rurales et urbaines au sein des états, les effets sont robustes et contrastés. En zone urbaine, la libéralisation commerciale aurait contribué à accroître les niveaux de pauvreté et d'inégalité, tandis qu'elle entraînerait une diminution des inégalités en zone rurale (aucun impact significatif n'est observé sur la pauvreté rurale). En termes d'insertion des états brésiliens dans le commerce international, une hausse du taux de pénétration des importations joue dans le même sens que la libéralisation commerciale. Mais la propension à exporter d'un état contribuerait à réduire tant la pauvreté que les inégalités de revenu.

This article proposes to uncover another motivation behind the introduction of antidumping duties through the interaction between a Northern firm, a Southern one and an administering authority in charge of setting an antidumping procedure. The goods from the South are assumed to be ethically unsound while those from the North are ethically sound. Both firms compete on price in order to satisfy the demand of the North. We show that a smear campaign engaged by the domestic firm may influence the antidumping duty by reducing the credence of the consumers in the Southern good. Moreover it can discourage the foreign firm to actively cooperate in the antidumping investigation and this reaction of the Southern firm may increase the antidumping duty.

Cet article a fait l'objet d'un WP SMART-LERECO n°09-13, voir lien; We investigate whether an aging population may challenge the supremacy of large working cities. To this end, we develop an economic geography model with two types of individuals (workers and retirees) and two sectors (local services and manufacturing). Workers produce and consume; the elderly consume only. As a result, the mobility decision of workers is driven by both the wage gap and the cost-of-living gap, unlike the elderly who react to the differences in the cost of living only. We show that the return of pre-industrial urban system dominated by rentier cities does not seem to be on the agenda. Quite the opposite, the future of large working cities is still bright, the reason being that today's urban costs act as a strong force that prevents a large share of local services and manufacturing firms from following the rentiers in the elderly cities, while the supply of differentiated b2c services impede their complete separation.

International audience; Advances in communication technology make it possible for workers in India to supply business services to head offices located anywhere. This has the potential to put high-wage workers in direct competition with much lower paid Indian workers. Service trade, however, like goods trade, is subject to strong distance effects, implying that the remote supply of services remains limited. We investigate this proposition by deriving a gravity-like equation for service trade and estimating it for a large sample of countries and different categories of service trade. We find that distance costs are high but are declining over time. Our estimates suggest that delivery costs create a significant advantage for local workers relative to competing workers in distant countries.

We consider an economic geography model of a new genre: all firms and workers are mobile and their agglomeration within a city generates rising urban costs through competition on a land market. When commuting costs are low (high), the industry tends to be agglomerated (dispersed). With two sectors, the same tendencies prevail for extreme commuting cost values, but richer patterns arise for intermediate values. When one good is perfectly mobile, the corresponding industry is partially dispersed and the other industry is agglomerated, thus showing regional specialization. When one sector supplies a nontradeable consumption good, this sector is more agglomerated than the other. The corresponding equilibrium involves an urban hierarchy: a larger array of varieties of each good is produced within the same city.