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We analyze the welfare effects of trade and migration, focusing on two-sided horizontal heterogeneity among workers and firms. Horizontal (skill-type) heterogeneity among workers generates monopsonistic labor markets as well as within-firm wage inequality and an endogenous quality of worker–firm matches. In a model combining horizontal worker heterogeneity with monopolistic competition on goods markets, trade liberalization causes firm exit which raises wage markdowns and worsens the average quality of worker–firm matches. It also increases the degree of income inequality. Yet, aggregate welfare is higher under free trade than under autarky. Integration of labor markets leads to two-way migration between symmetric countries. Liberalizing migration has an ambiguous effect on the quality of worker–firm matches and income inequality, but it leads to lower wage markdowns and lower goods prices and thus to higher welfare in both countries. Our model advocates opening up labor markets simultaneously with trade liberalization.

Trade regulation can create jobs in the sectors it protects or promotes, but almost always at the expense of destroying a roughly equivalent number elsewhere in the economy. At a product-specific or micro level and in the short term, controlling trade could reduce the offending imports and save jobs, but for the economy as a whole and in the long term, this position has neither theoretical support nor empirical evidence in its favor. Given that protection may have other—usually adverse—effects, understanding the difficulties in using it to manage employment is important for economic policy.

We develop a multi-country, multi-sector trade model with labor market frictions and equilibrium unemployment. Trade opening leads to a reduction in unemployment if it raises real wages and reallocates labor towards sectors with lower-than-average labor market frictions. We estimate sector-specific labor market frictions and trade elasticities using employment data from 25 OECD countries and worldwide trade data. We then quantify the potential unemployment and real wage effects of implementing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and of eliminating trade imbalances worldwide. The unemployment and real wage effects work in conflicting directions for some countries under some trade regimes, such as the US under TTIP. We introduce a welfare criterion that accounts for both effects and splits such ties. Accordingly, US welfare is predicted to decrease under TTIP and increase under TPP.

We study the effects of a positive export shock on labor allocation between the informal, microenterprise sector and the formal firm sector in a low-income country. The United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement led to large reductions in US tariffs on Vietnamese exports. We find that the share of manufacturing workers in Vietnam in the formal sector increased by 5 percentage points in response to the US tariff reductions. The reallocation was greater for workers in more internationally integrated provinces and for younger cohorts. We estimate the gap in labor productivity within manufacturing across the informal and formal sectors. This gap and the aggregate labor productivity gain from the export-induced reallocation of workers across the two sectors are reduced when we account for worker heterogeneity, measurement error, and differences in labor intensity of production. (JEL F16, J24, O14, O17, O19, P23, P33)

The paper presents a model of an economy whose urban structure consists of cities of different types. All cities of different types. All cities produce a non-tradeable final good using both types of tradeable intermediate varieties. Each city has an internal spatial structure: individuals commute to the CBD in order to work, when employed, and to seek jobs, when unemployed. Hiring by each intermediate producing firm is subject to frictions, which are modeled in the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides fashion. Job matching requires either travel to the CBD for face to face contacts or, alternatively, referrals from social contacts.City type is conferred by specialization in producing one of the two types of intermediate varieties, diversified cities, where both types are produced, and there is intercity trade in intermediate varieties. The paper examines the properties of equilibrium with intercity trade and its dependence on such parameters as those pertaining to productivity, the matching process, the rate of job destruction and their consequences for unemployment, output and welfare across the economy along a steady state. The model's use of international trade tools confers a central role to labor market tightness, akin to factor intensity. A natural dependence of unemployment on city size is generated. The paper provides a framework for studying spatial mismatch. Equilibrium outcomes generically diverge from the planner's optimum: socially optimal unemployment trades off the probability of employment to search socts of firms independently for each skill type and independently of city size, and city sizes are independent of labor market tightness considerations but reflect both market size effects and the skill composition of the economy.

We study the impact of regional and sectoral productivity changes on the U.S. economy. To that end, we consider an environment that captures the effects of interregional and intersectoral trade in propagating disaggregated productivity changes at the level of a sector in a given U.S. state to the rest of the economy. The quantitative model we develop features pairwise interregional trade across all 50 U.S. states, 26 traded and non-traded industries, labor as a mobile factor, and structures and land as an immobile factor. We allow for sectoral linkages in the form of an intermediate input structure that matches the U.S. input-output matrix. Using data on trade flows by industry between states, as well as other regional and industry data, we obtain the aggregate, regional and sectoral elasticities of measured TFP, GDP, and employment to regional and sectoral productivity changes. We find that such elasticities can vary significantly depending on the sectors and regions affected and are importantly determined by the spatial structure of the US economy. We highlight the role of these elasticities by tracing out the effects of productivity gains in California in the Computers and Electronics industry between 2002 and 2007 on all other U.S. sectors and regions.

I build and estimate a dynamic structural model of sectoral choices with heterogeneous workers accumulating imperfectly transferable human capital. Utility costs provide an additional barrier to mobility. Estimated by Simulated Minimum Distance on administrative data covering the population of Danish workers, costs are found to be in the range of 10% to 19% of average annual wages. Removing permanent unobserved heterogeneity increases the utility costs by an order of magnitude. I show that both the imperfect transferability of human capital and the utility costs are important in explaining the slow adjustment of the labour market following shocks to the economy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Este artículo presenta el resultado de una investigación realizada al sector agroindustrial de exportación en el estado de Michoacán, donde se midió el desempeño competitivo, utilizando la metodología multicriterio AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) para la construcción de un índice, utilizando las variables: calidad, innovación tecnológica, gestión ambiental, precio, mercado y políticas públicas agroindustriales. Se concluye que en general el sector agroindustrial se encuentra en un nivel competitivo, siendo el limón procesado el producto con mayor puntuación. Los resultados obtenidos permiten diseñar políticas públicas que fortalezcan al sector y logre un posicionamiento sostenido nacional e internacionalmente.

The objective of this paper is to show that part of the fixed cost of a firm’s trade expansion is due to the acquisition of new internal capabilities (e.g., technology, production processes or skills), which implies a costly change in the firm’s internal labor organization. We investigate the relationship between a firm’s labor structure, in terms of the relative number of managers, and the scope of its export portfolio, in terms of its product-destination varieties. The empirical analysis is based on a matched employer-employee dataset covering the population of French firms from tradable sectors over the period 2009-2015. Our analysis suggests that market ex- pansion, both through export entry and export diversification, is associated with a change in the firm’s workforce composition, namely an increase in the number of managerial layers. These results are generally confirmed with the use of an instrumental variable approach to control for reverse causality. We show how these results are consistent with a simple model, where the complexity of a firm’s operations increases with the number of product-destination couples ex- ported and the manager’s role is to address the unsolved problems arising from such increased operational complexity.

Diese Dissertationsschrift befasst sich mit der ökonomischen Bedeutung von Regionen innerhalb Deutschlands. Regionen sind dabei aus zweierlei Sicht ein wichtiges Untersuchungsobjekt. Dies gilt zum Einen, da makroökonomische Schocks über Regionen Hinweg zu substantiell unterschiedlichen Effekten führen. Dringliche Themen wie die Robotisierung und die Verwendung künstlicher Intelligenz, der Brexit, oder US-amerikanische Zölle werden Würzburg anders Beeinflussen als Berlin und implizieren somit unterschiedliche Interessen bei der jeweiligen Bevölkerung, den jeweiligen Firmen und Politikern. Zum Anderen können regionale ökonomische Schocks wie Erfindungen, Insolvenzen, oder die Ansiedlung eines bedeutenden Betriebs durch Handel und „input-output“ Verbindungen zu Schocks von makroökonomischer Bedeutung anwachsen. Allerdings sind regionale Heterogenitäten innerhalb Deutschlands und die komplizierten Netzwerke verschiedenster Art zwischen Regionen weder gut dokumentiert noch ausreichenden verstanden. Dies gilt insbesondere auch für lokale Arbeitsmärkte welche ein Kerninteressen der Regionalpolitik darstellen und ebenfalls von bedeutenden Heterogenitäten geprägt sind. Die vorliegende Arbeit analysiert und quantifiziert das regionale Produktions- und Handelsnetzwerk innerhalb Deutschlands und untersucht welche Aspekte für die beobachteten breiten Unterschiede bei der Anpassung lokaler Arbeitsmärkte an ökonomische Schocks verantwortlich sind. Der erste Aufsatz, „How deep is your love? A quantitative spatial analysis of the transatlantic trade partnership“, setzt sich dabei mit der Prognose von Effekten eines konkreten Schocks in Form des vorgeschlagenen transatlantischen Freihandelsabkommens (TTIP) auseinander. Die Arbeit findet einerseits nur mäßige Wohlfahrtseffekte, sowohl für die Vereinigten Staaten als auch für die Europäische Union und Drittstaaten, andererseits zeigt sie, dass alle Landkreise in Deutschland Wohlfahrtsgewinne erzielen und es somit zumindest regional keine Verlierer des Abkommens geben würde. Der zweite Aufsatz, „RIOTs in Germany - Constructing an interregional input-output table for Germany“, nutzt einen einzigartigen Datensatz von Gütersendungen per LKW, Zug oder Schiff zwischen allen 402 deutschen Landkreisen im Jahr 2010 um, mit Hilfe weiterer Daten, eine interregionale input-output Tabelle für Deutschland zu erstellen und die Verflechtungen lokaler Märkte zu untersuchen. Der dritte Aufsatz, „On the Road (Again): Commuting and Local Employment Elasticities in Germany“, analysiert die Bedeutung des Pendelns für lokale Arbeitsmärkte. Es zeigt sich dabei, dass Pendelströme eine zentrale Marge bei der Anpassung an lokale Schocks darstellen und dass deutsche Arbeitsmärkte wesentlich flexibler und anpassungsfähiger sind als weitläufig angenommen. Der vierte Aufsatz, „Shocking Germany - A spatial analysis of German regional labor markets“, integriert Arbeitslosigkeit in die zur Prognose lokaler Schocks verwendeten quantitativen Modelle. Dadurch kann er den Effekte von durch Schocks ausgelöster Migration innerhalb Deutschland auf lokale Arbeitsmärkte quantifizieren. Es zeigt sich, dass die Änderung lokaler Arbeitslosigkeitsraten als Antwort auf lokale Produktivitätsschocks durch Migration im Durchschnitt um 70 Prozent gedämpft wird. Strukturelle Anpassung führen langfristig zu einer im Vergleich wesentliche geringeren Änderung dieser Raten., Economists (should) care about regions! On the one hand this is true because macroeconomic shocks have vastly different effects across regions. The pressing topics of robotization and artificial intelligence, Brexit, or U.S. tariffs will affect Würzburg differently than Berlin, implying varying interests among its population, firms and politicians. On the other hand, shocks in individual regions, such as inventions, bankruptcies or the attraction of a major plant can, through trade and input-output linkages, magnify to aggregate effects of macroe- conomic importance. Yet, regional heterogeneities in Germany and the complicated network of linkages that connect regions are still not well documented nor understood. A fact that is especially true for local labor markets that are of core interest to regional policy makers and that also feature substantial heterogeneity. This thesis provides a thorough quantification of such heterogeneities and an in-depth analysis of the sources and mechanisms that drive these differences.

This paper analyses the potentials of jobs to be offshored or outsourced. We use four waves of the BIBB/BAuA Survey on Qualification and Working Conditions in Germany and employ a large set of potential determinants of offshoring and outsourcing derived from the literature. Applying the datadriven method of principal component analysis, we provide two indicators that measure both the offshoring potentials (cross-country geographical relocation) and the outsourcing potentials (organisational relocation) at the level of jobs, occupations, tasks, or industries. Our results show significant variation in the determinants of both dimensions. In addition to the direct contribution, our paper provides two indicators that can be used to further investigate the economic effects of job offshorability.

We estimate foreign ownership wage premiums for every 3-digit manufacturing industry in China and discover a wide range of premiums both for so-called "foreign" ownership and for overseas Chinese ownership of firms. Foreign ownership generates larger and more prevalent wage premiums than overseas Chinese ownership of firms, but both types of foreign ownership produce wage premiums that respond similarly in hypothesis testing of determinants. Using the number of computers per worker as an indicator of a firm’s technology level, we find support in 76-78% of industries for the hypothesis that foreign firms pay higher wages to reduce the risk of worker turnover and the accompanying technology leakage to domestic rivals. However, this determinant explains only 5-6% of the foreign wage premium, on average. We find the most intensive support for the "fair wage" hypothesis that foreign firms pay higher wages because they are more profitable than domestic firms and workers in more profitable firms expect to be paid more, otherwise they will shirk. This hypothesis explains an average of 8-9% of the foreign wage premiums, with support for the hypothesis found in 72-75% of the industries using firm’s total profits per worker as the added wage determinant. Intangible assets and training costs were found to be much weaker individual determinants of foreign wage premiums. When we consider the best combination of explanatory variables to include in each industry’s wage regression, we find support for our combined hypotheses in the vast majority of industries, but we still find large residual wage premiums attached to foreign ownership in China.

Selling internationally requires products that resonate with an international customer base and therefore an approach to markets that is in keeping with diverse cultures (i.e., relational capital). As emphasized by international business studies, this relational capital is in turn related to the successful teaming of a diverse workforce, as this process teaches employees to operate in multicultural environments. This knowledge becomes like an intangible asset to which firms can resort, also when engaging in international transactions. We explore this channel empirically, investigating the impact of workforce diversity on firms' exporting performances and find that ethnic diversity further justifies firms' different presence in international markets. Since hiring is not a random practice, and firms ultimately select into ethnically different labor forces, we exploit the EU enlargement of 2004 to instrument for the diversity of the pool of workers locally recruitable. Because migrants tend to settle where the attitude toward them is most favorable, we use the median voter's political ideology at firm's location to measure the hostility at time of settlement. This gives our instrument spatial variation besides time variation.

This paper examines whether starting to import contributes to skill upgrading among Indonesian plants. Our data records the distribution of years of employee schooling in each plant. We examine how starting to import affects the demand for highly educated workers within and across production and non-production occupations categories at the plant level. We estimate a model of importing and skill-biased technological change in which selection into importing arises due to unobservable heterogenous returns from importing. Both instrumental variable regression and marginal treatment effect estimates confirm that importing has substantially increased the relative demand for educated workers within each occupation. In contrast, we do not consistently estimate a significant impact of importing on the relative demand for non-production workers.

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winners from growing Chinese demand for commodities. Using census data for Brazil, we find that local labour markets more affected by Chinese import competition experienced slower growth in manufacturing wages and in-migration rates between 2000 and 2010, and greater rises in local wage inequality. However, in locations benefiting from rising Chinese demand, we observe higher wage growth, lower takeup of cash transfers and positive effects on job quality.

We analyze changes in the skill content of occupations in US four-digit manufacturing industries between 1999 and 2010. Following a >task-based> approach, we elaborate a measure of non-routine skill intensity that captures the effects of industry exposure to both technology and international trade. The article adds to previous literature by focusing on both the determinants of demand for non-routine skills and their effects on industry productivity and wages. The key finding is that import competition from low-wage countries has been a strong driver of demand for non-routine skills during the 2000s. Both technology and trade with low-wage countries are associated with mild cross-industry convergence in skill intensity, while trade with high- and medium-wage countries are at the root of persistent heterogeneity across occupational groups. We also find that higher non-routine skill intensity has had, at best, a modest effect on productivity and wages, except in high-skill occupations., D.C. acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (RYC-2011-07888).

This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms (the years 1986 to 2000) altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across commuting zones to show that school drop-out increased with local expansions in export-manufacturing industries. The magnitudes I find suggest that for every 25 jobs created, one student dropped out of school at grade 9 rather than continuing through to grade 12. These effects are driven by less-skilled export-manufacturing jobs which raised the opportunity cost of schooling for students at the margin. (JEL F14, F16, J24, L60, O14, O19)

The consumption of imported goods is thought to influence consumers’ views and attitudes toward export countries. It is important to consider this issue, especially when there is political tension and conflict between countries. Because of their historical background, political conflict exists between Korea and Japan. This paper examines the effect of viewing Japanese anime (animation) on the attitudes of Koreans toward Japanese living in Korea. The major findings of the study show that the more frequently adult Koreans view Japanese anime, the more likely they are to accept Japanese as workplace colleagues and neighbors after controlling for endogeneity bias using instrumental variables. The findings of this paper imply that via the consumption of imported cultural goods, people are exposed to positive traits of the trading partner, and thus consumers have a stronger affinity with the export country. From this, we derive the policy implication that promoting the trade of modern cultural goods is effective in increasing mutual understanding between trading partners, thereby reducing political tension between them.

Our objective in this paper is threefold. First, to identify the major common shocks that hit these countries upon entry into the EMU. Second, taking Greece as our case study, to construct a simple macroeconomic model of the policies Greek governments pursued in the presence of these shocks, and to employ its solution so as to highlight the outcomes that were expected to result. From this endeavor, we find that the policies which were put in place led unavoidably to a severe economic crisis and eventual bankruptcy. Finally, in view of these findings and what happened in 2009,we raise and attempt to answer questions like, for example: How can we explain the policies that were adopted in the advent of monetary union shocks? Could they have been anticipated? And if so, why did they escape the attention of the designers of the Maastricht Treaty? The answer to which we are led by the analysis is that the shocks in all these countries were perceived by their governments as opportunities to hold on to their entrenched positions. That this happened, we conclude, reflects a failure in the mechanisms of economic convergence that were embedded in the Maastricht Treaty as well as in the effectiveness of European Union (EU) institutions that were empowered with their enforcement.

A competitive search model of the labor market is embedded into a small open economy with firm and worker heterogeneity. Search frictions generate equilibrium unemployment and income inequality between identical workers, in addition to income differences between skill groups. Numerical simulations of the model reveal that an increase in trade is likely to increase within-group inequality and decrease unemployment, while the effect on the skill premium is ambiguous. Overall the effect of trade on the labor market is minor if only a small fraction of the labor force is employed in exporting and import-competing industries.

This paper investigates how internal migration is affected by Brazil's increased integration into the world economy. We analyze the impact of regional differences in access to foreign demand on sector-specific bilateral migration rates between the Brazilian states for the years 1995 to 2003. Using international trade data, we compute a foreign market access measure at the sectoral level, which is exogenous to domestic migration. A higher foreign market access is associated with a higher local labor demand and attracts workers via two potential channels: higher wages and new job opportunities. Our results show that both channels play a significant role in internal migration. Further, we find a heterogeneous impact across industries, according to their comparative advantage on the world market. However, the observed impact is driven by the strong reaction of low-educated workers to changes in market access. This finding is consistent with the fact that Brazil is exporting mainly goods that are intensive in unskilled labor.

We investigate the role that labor costs hold in exporters’ performance. To do so, we exploit a large-scale French reform that granted most firms a tax credit proportional to the wagebill of their employees paid below a given threshold. This policy effectively translated into a cut in labor cost whose magnitude varies depending on firm-specific wage structures. We use the predicted treatment intensity based on pre-reform composition of the labor force as an instrument for the actual policy-induced firm-level change in labor costs. Although our point estimates are consistent with commonly estimated firm-level trade elasticities combined with reasonable labor shares in total costs, coefficients are found to be very noisy, suggesting lack of robust evidence of a causal effect of the policy. We discuss several potential explanations for our results as well as their implications.

The paper investigates the impact of import competition on rent-sharing between firms and employees. First, by applying recent advances in the estimation of price-costs margins to a large panel of French manufacturing firms for the period 1993–2007,we are able to classify each firm into labor- and product-market regimes based on the presence/absence of market power. Second, we concentrate on firms that operate in an efficient bargaining framework to study the effect of import penetration on workers’ bargaining power. We find that French imports from other OECD countries have a negative effect on bargaining power, whereas the impact of imports from low wage countries is more muted. By providing firm-level evidence on the relationship between international trade and rent sharing, the paper sheds new light on the effect of trade liberalization on the labor market.

We study the equilibrium determinants of firm-level heterogeneity in a model in which firms can affect the variance of their productivity draws at the entry stage, and explore the implications in closed and open economy. By allowing firms to choose the size of their investment in innovation projects of unknown quality, the model yields a Pareto distribution for productivity with a shape parameter that depends on industry-level characteristics. A novel result is that export opportunities, by increasing the payoffs in the tail, induce firms to invest in bigger projects with more spread-out outcomes. Moreover, when more productive firms also pay higher wages, trade amplifies wage dispersion by making all firms more unequal. These results are consistent with new evidence on how firm-level heterogeneity and wage dispersion vary in a panel of U.S. industries. Finally, we use patent data across U.S. states and over time to provide evidence in support of a specific mechanism of the model, namely, that export opportunities increase firm heterogeneity by fostering innovation. Forthcoming in The Economic Journal

Calibrating a stylized version of the Dornbusch-Fischer-Samuelson model, this paper finds that relative to a cohort of 97 trading partners, the US capital stock, labor force, and nominal GDP per capita decreased, while the level of technology embodied in its output increased. These observed dynamics suggest a shift in comparative advantage that, coupled with increased production at the extensive and intensive margins, yields an expectation of labor market churning. Grouping trading partners by World Bank income classifications reveals that observed changes for low and lower middle income cohorts resulted in more pronounced shifts in comparative advantage. Examining employment and earnings in US manufacturing industries, a dynamic regression model reveals that increased import penetration has significant negative effects on production worker employment and wages, while increases in exports has significant positive effects on production worker employment. Variation in labor market outcomes is found across income classifications, as well as industries categorized by trade orientation.

We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from factories, to years before the factories arrive close to some villages, and to the marriage and enrollment decisions of their male siblings. Girls exposed to the garment sector delay marriage and childbirth. This stems from (a) young girls becoming more likely to be enrolled in school after garment jobs (which reward literacy and numeracy) arrive, and (b) older girls becoming more likely to be employed outside the home in garment-proximate villages. The demand for education generated through manufacturing growth appears to have a much larger effect on female educational attainment compared to a large-scale government conditional cash transfer program to encourage female schooling.

Trade economists have long studied the effects of globalization on wage differences between workers with different levels of skill or education. 1 This literature has generally sought to link globalization to changes in the economy-wide skill premium. Attanasio, Goldberg, and Pavcnik (2004) and Gonzaga, Menezes Filho, and Terra (2006) are salient examples that investigate whether changes in sector-specific prices or tariffs, changes in skill composition within and across sectors, and movements in the skill premium are consistent with the predictions of workhorse trade models, such as the HeckscherOhlin model. However, there is little evidence directly establishing a causal effect of globalization on the skill premium. 2 More recently, a growing body of research has focused on trade’s differential effects across local markets within a country. 3 In this paper, we combine these two strands of literature by developing a theoretically consistent approach to studying the causal

The international movement of economic factors such as capital and skilled labor has complex effects on the economies involved, especially when multiple factors move at the same time. One important effect is the potential change in wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor—particularly, in developing countries that have agreed to trade with developed countries. This study considers a small open economy with two goods and three factors to determine whether wage inequality increases or decreases due to increased movement of these factors. The key findings are that wage inequality can unambiguously increase and decrease, under certain circumstances regarding the capital intensity of the sector(s), the initial amount of foreign factors, and the shares of factors in national income.

Globalization has led to the development of economies all around the world. However, without people, there would not be globalization. Thus, people play the most important role in any economy. Demography is a scientific discipline that studies the number and development of human population, its structure and trends. Changes in population are the result of natural population growth and migrations. It is considered that natural population growth and migration are the very determinants of the development of the population of any country. Population structure is affected by other factors as well, such as fertility, mortality, natural disasters, wars and etc. Eastern Croatia was affected by the 1990s war which has significantly changed its demography. The consequences of war are still evident, primarily in the slow economic development. The aim of this paper is to show how the demographic trends have influenced the current position of Slavonski Brod-Posavina County, as a part of Eastern Croatia, based on the analysis of the collected statistical data from the Census and other publications. The paper will also analyze the number and population structure with regard to education and employment.

We study the consequences of economic reforms in New Zealand since the beginning of the 1990s. Inflation targeting became the monetary policymaking framework of the RBNZ in 1990. In the years that followed, New Zealand implemented labor market reform and became increasingly integrated in world trade. We use a New Keynesian model with rich trade microfoundations and labor market dynamics to study the performance of inflation targeting versus alternative monetary policy rules for New Zealand in relation to these market characteristics and reforms. We show that nominal income targeting would have been a better choice than inflation targeting or price-level targeting prior to market reforms by delivering more stable unemployment dynamics in a distorted economic environment. Nominal income targeting would also have been better than inflation targeting with respect to the transition costs of labor market reforms, though inflation targeting allowed for better management of the transition after trade integration. With New Zealand in its new long-run environment of integrated trade and flexible labor markets, the welfare gap between nominal income targeting and price/inflation targeting declines, as market reforms lower unemployment volatility.

Las tendencias del comercio internacional han modificado la estructura de costos, precios, logística, cadenas de suministros y por consiguiente de las ventajas comparativas, estas tendencias de igual manera han definido la competitividad comercial de los países siendo cada vez más relevante el nivel de integración de las redes mundiales de transporte como factor impulsor del comercio internacional. En este trabajo se evalúa, a través del Análisis de Componente Principales, la competitividad del transporte aéreo y marítimo internacional considerando a su vez las variables más importantes que inciden en este sector y el desempeño de las economías respecto de dichas variables, estudiando la estructura del sistema de transporte aéreo y marítimo internacional para veintinueve países, entre ellos siete de América Latina. Los resultados mostrados en el índice de competitividad del transporte internacional, señalan que los países más competitivos en materia de transporte aéreo y marítimo internacional de acuerdo a las variables analizadas son, en orden descendente, Estados Unidos, China, Australia, Panamá, Alemania, Hong Kong, Chile, Singapur, Corea, Argentina, Bélgica, España, Canadá, Japón y Reino Unido. Destaca también que los países de América Latina con mayores puntuaciones en este rubro son Panamá, Chile, Argentina, Brasil, México, Perú y Costa Rica.

International trade trends have changed the cost structure, pricing, logistics, supply chain and hence comparative advantages. Such trends have similarly defined the trade competitiveness of countries becoming more relevant with the level of integration of global transport networks as a driver of international trade. In this paper we evaluate through Principal Component Analysis methodology the international transport competitiveness considering the most important variables that affect this sector and the economic performance of these variables on transportation. We analyze the structure of the international transport system of twenty-nine countries including seven Latin American countries. The results indicate that the most competitive countries in the field of international aviation and maritime transport are, in descending order, the United States, China, Australia, Panama, Germany, Hong Kong, Chile, Singapore, Korea, Argentina, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Japan and the UK. We stress that the Latin American countries with higher scores in this category are Panama, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Costa Rica.

We analyze how a set of traditional as well as new determinants affect trade among European countries over the period 1992–2008. The factors encompass variables from the areas of geography, culture, institutions, infrastructure, and trade direction. Trade is analyzed for three types of goods: primary goods, parts and components, and capital goods. For each type of good we also distinguish its definiti on in terms of flows, intensive margin, and extensive margin. Methodologically we first derive country-pair fixed effects over all possible pairs of export-import partners, and in the second stage we relate fixed effects with a set of influential factors. We show (i) the intuitive and varying effects of geographical, cultural, and institutional factors, (ii) the beneficial effects of soft and hard infrastructure, and (iii) the key importance of the trade between old and new EU members.

This paper develops a revealed preference methodology for exploring whether time inconsistencies in household choice are the product of nonstationarities at the individual level or the result of individual heterogeneity and renegotiation within the collective unit. An empirical application to household-level microdata highlights that an explicit recognition of the collective nature of choice allows the vast majority of household behaviour to be rationalised by theory that assumes preference stationarity at the individual level. For our particular short panel data set, simply permitting limited intrahousehold heterogeneity in time preferences allows the choices of 98.4% of the sample to be rationalised by a model that assumes exponential discounting at the individual level. We also find that couples characterized by lower divergence in spousal discount rates are older, more likely to have children and wealthier, which we take as indications of experiencing higher match quality.

(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.

This paper explains why a developing country may experience a jobless growth in the organised sectors during liberalised regime within the framework of a three-sector mobile capital version of Harris-Todaro type general equilibrium model describing rural-urban migration with agricultural dualism and a non-traded intermediate input. Main findings support the fact that as a consequence of different trade reform policies, organised sectors have experienced increased competition from foreign markets which has forced them to lax labour laws, with the freedom to switch towards more capital-intensive techniques of production, resulting retrenchment of relatively less productive workers and ending up with a jobless growth under the liberalised regime. These results are particularly interesting for their contradiction to the predictions of the standard Harris-Todaro model.

In this paper, we use a linked employer–employee database from Brazil to evaluate the wage effects of trade reform. With an aggregate (firm-level) analysis of this question, we find that a decline in trade protection is associated with an increase in average wages in exporting firms relative to domestic firms, consistent with earlier studies. However, using disaggregated, employer–employee level data, and allowing for the endogenous assignment of workers to firms due to match-specific productivity, we find that the premium paid to workers at exporting firms is economically and statistically insignificant, as is the differential impact of trade openness on the wages of workers at exporting firms relative to otherwise identical workers at domestic firms. We also find that workforce composition improves systematically in exporting firms, in terms of the combination of worker ability and the quality of worker–firm matches, post-liberalization. These results stand in stark contrast to the findings reported in many earlier studies and underscore the importance of endogenous matching and, more generally, non-random labor market allocation mechanisms, in determining the effects of trade policy changes on wages.

We develop an open economy general equilibrium model, with auction-based directed search unemployment, to study the interactions of trade and unemployment. The theory ascribes all outcomes purely to the fundamentals of technology and endowment. If countries differ by endowment, trade makes both the unemployment rate and the rental in the capital-(labour-) abundant country rise (decline) but does not lead to equalization. If, alternatively, countries differ by technology, trade increases (decreases) the unemployment rate in the country whose technology is relatively superior (inferior) for producing the capital-intensive good.

We explore the role of trade in differentiated final goods as well as offshoring of tasks for inequality both within and between countries, emphasizing the distinction between managerial and production labour. We extend Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2012), where task trade is driven by external economies of scale, by considering asymmetric endowments. Identifying possible equilibrium patterns of task trade, we find little scope for two-way trade if endowments are asymmetric. Our numerical simulations identify non-monotonicities between the level of offshoring and measures of within-country as well as between-country inequality. Remunerations des gestionnaires et des travailleurs : delocalisation, taille du pays, et dotation de facteurs. On explore le role du commerce de biens differenciees finaux ainsi que celui de la delocalisation des tâches dans l'explication de l'inegalite, a la fois intra et entre pays, en mettant l'accent sur la distinction entre travail de gestion et travail de production. On developpe le modele de Grossman et Rossi-Hansberg (2012) ou le deplacement des tâches est enclenche par les economies d'echelle externes, en considerant les dotations asymetriques de facteurs. En identifiant les patterns d'equilibres possibles du deplacement des tâches, on trouve peu de possibilite pour un commerce bilateral si les dotations sont asymetriques. Des simulations numeriques identifient des relations non-monotones entre le niveau de delocalisation et des mesures d'inegalites intra-pays ou entre pays.

The aim of this paper is to determine the impact of quality, price, technological innovation, environmental management, market and public policy agribusiness competitiveness in international agribusiness in Michoacán. A theoretical review, where the variables are identified and noted that studies have been performed agribusiness in Michoacán, few were performed. So, the article provides an input for decision making in the design of public policies agribusiness. To measure competitiveness, a questionnaire consisting of 80 items was applied to 51 companies identified the sector was used. A model to see the interrelationships between variables using the technique Partial Least Squares (PLS) is constructed. The results show that there is a high level of correlation of the variables to competitiveness and that is the Market Variable who else affects the competitiveness and quality put side is a factor that require greater attention from business and government. Key words: Competitiveness, Agribusiness, PLS.

In this paper, we link industry-level data on offshoring activities of U.S. multinational firms, import penetration, and export shares with individual level worker data from the Current Population Surveys. We examine whether increasing globalization through offshoring or trade has led to reallocation of labor, both within and out of manufacturing, and measure its impact on the wages of domestic workers. We also control for the "routineness" of individual occupations. Our results suggest that (1) offshoring to high wage countries is positively correlated with U.S. manufacturing employment (2) offshoring to low wage countries is associated with U.S. employment declines (3) wages for workers who remain in manufacturing are generally positively affected by offshoring; in particular, we find that wages are positively associated with an increase in U.S. multinational employment in high income locations (4) much of the negative effects of globalization operate through downward pressure on wages of workers who leave manufacturing to take jobs in agriculture or services and (5) the downward pressure on aggregate U.S. wages operating through import competition has been quite important for some occupations. This effect has been overlooked because it operates across, not within, industries.

Polonya ve Türkiye, uluslararasý raporlara göre, dünyanýn en geliþen 30 ülkesi arasýnda yer almaktadýr (Türkiye 9.; Polonya ise 19.sýrada). Milli gelirde Polonya AB’nin en büyük 6. ve en fazla yabancý yatýrýmý çeken (Almanya’dan sonra) 2. ekonomisi iken, Türkiye ise dünyanýn 17. büyük ekonomisidir. Polonya ile Türkiye arasýnda kurulan diplomatik iliþkilerin 600. yýldönümü (2014) nedeniyle yapýlan bu çalýþmada iki ülke þu üç açýdan deðerlendirilmektedir: (1) Polonya ve Türkiye arasýnda tarihsel planda ve günümüzde birçok iktisadi temas (yatýrým, dýþ ticaret ve turizm, vb.) alaný ve halen yürürlükte olan 12 tane iktisadi antlaþma bulunmaktadýr. Örneðin, Gümrük Birliði, 6 milyar dolar civarýndaki ticaret hacmini arttýrmaya devam etmektedir. Son küresel mali kriz iki ülke arasýndaki iliþkilerin istikrarýný bozmamýþtýr. (2) Bazý küresel göstergelere göre iki ülkenin geliþmiþlik düzeyi farklýlýk göstermektedir. Örneðin, her iki ülke yolsuzluk endeksi (CPI) bakýmýndan 176 ülke arasýnda “orta temiz” (2012) ve özgürlük endeksi (IEF) bakýmýndan “orta özgür” (2013) sayýlýrken; insani geliþme endeksi (HDI) bakýmýndan Polonya “çok yüksek geliþmiþ”, Türkiye ise “yüksek geliþmiþ ülkeler” grubunda (2013) yer almýþtýr. (3) Ayrýca iki ülke birbirlerine olan tarihsel yakýnlýktan dolayý benzer transatlantik eðilimlere de sahiptir. Örneðin her iki ülkede, AB yerine ABD’nin küresel liderliði daha fazla benimsenmektedir.

From the perspective of trade integration, the real challenge for Romania is not increasing trade with the developed economies of the European Union, but rather that of deepening integration by reducing trade structural divergences. Without a structural modernization of trade, Romanian economy will lose, on medium and long term, some of the European market, thereby increasing the probability of asymmetric shocks in integrated commercial sectors. The objective of this study is to analyze the convergence of trade structure with the EU, in terms of the degree of technology complexity used in the production of goods imported and exported. Thus, I have shown that the new EU member states (including Romania) export largely the same categories of goods as well as developed economies, but also that their trade is based mostly on goods containing medium and high technology.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of offshoring on employment in France. In economic analysis, is often associated the phenomenon of relocation to the problem of unemployment. Using a Computable General Equilibrium Model (CGEM), we simulate the relationship between offshoring to the CEECs and the rising inequality between skilled (TQ) and unskilled (TNQ) workers. In order to study this impact, we will initially talk about theoretical and empirical contributions explaining the relation “relocation-employment”. In a second step, we will develop a CGE model (the model is implemented in GAMS) to test the impact of offshoring to the CEECs on wage and unemployment rate for skilled and unskilled workers. The simulation results show that there is a negative effect of offshoring on the situation of TNQ in terms of wages and employment and a rather positive effect on TQ. This confirms the “Stolper-Samuelson” theorem.

Traditional international trade theories believe export trade has a positive effect on employment, which means exports would increase the level of employment with no difference between genders. Based on enterprise heterogeneity, however, the new-trade theories doubt this conclusion. Using the Chinese industrial enterprise database (2006¨C2009), this paper re-examines the relationship between export volume and the level of employment, and discusses different effects of exports on the employment of different genders. We find that although exports increase the total level of employment, enterprises¡¯ exports have a prominent negative effect on the employment of women. This proves that it is hard to optimize employment structure through the promotion of foreign trade, even if it improves the overall level of employment.

This paper challenges the conventional academic view that international outsourcing is just another form of gainful trade. Contrary to that view, we show that labour-service outsourcing can reduce the high-wage country's welfare even when product-market trade is beneficial, within a model that combines involuntary unemployment and monopolistic competition. Outsourcing's impact on welfare is worsened by a definite loss of jobs and a possible contraction in the range of varieties produced worldwide. While owners of capital benefit from outsourcing under certain conditions, labour's welfare always falls. Resume Consequences de la sous-traitance internationale sur le chomage et le bien-etre en regime de concurrence monopolistique. Ce texte remet en question le point de vue conventionnel des universitaires pour qui la sous-traitance internationale n'est qu'une autre forme de commerce porteur de gains. En opposition a ce point de vue, on montre que la sous-traitance de services de travail peut reduire le niveau de bien-etre du pays a hauts salaires meme quand le commerce dans le marche des produits est benefique – dans un modele qui combine chomage involontaire et concurrence monopolistique. L'impact de la sous-traitance sur bien-etre est rempire par une perte d'emplois et une contraction possible de la variete de produits au plan mondial. Alors que les proprietaires de capital beneficient de la sous-traitance dans certaines conditions, le bien-etre du travail decline toujours.

Between 1993 and 2013, the US trade deficit with Mexico and Canada increased from $17.0 to $177.2 billion, displacing 851 700 US jobs. All of the net jobs displaced were due to growing trade deficits with Mexico. The number of US jobs displaced by trade deficits with Canada declined slightly between 1993 and 2013. Prominent economists and US government officials predicted that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would lead to growing trade surpluses with Mexico and that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be gained. The evidence shows that the predicted surpluses in the wake of NAFTA's enactment in 1994 did not materialize. Growing trade deficits and job displacement, especially between the United States and Mexico, were the result of a surge in outsourcing of production by US and other foreign investors. The rise in outsourcing was fueled, in turn, by a surge in foreign direct investment into Mexico, which increased by more than 150 percent in the post-NAFTA period.

Uluslararasi iktisat literaturu, iki ulke arasindaki goc akimlarinin bu ulkelerin ticaret hacimlerini de arttirdigini ortaya koymaktadir. Bunun iki temel sebebi bulunmaktadir. Bunlardan birincisi, gocmenlerin gittikleri ulkede is aglari ve sosyal aglar kurarak islem maliyetlerini azaltmasidir. Ikinci olarak, gocmenlerin kendi ulkelerinden aliskin olduklari mallari tuketme egilimininde olmalari, ticareti arttirici yonde sonuclar dogurmaktadir. Bu calismanin amaci, uluslararasi goc akimlari ve dis ticaret arasindaki iliskinin Turkiye icin arastirilmasidir. Ancak bu calismada goc akimlarinin toplam dis ticaret uzerindeki degil, endustri-ici ticaret uzerindeki etkileri incelenmektedir. Bunun sebebi, emek gocunun farkli mal gruplarinin dis ticaretini farkli sekilde etkileyebilecek olmasidir. Calisma kapsaminda Turkiye’den goc akiminin oldugu secilmis 20 ulke icin 1985-2010 donemine ait veri kullanilmaktadir. Calismada elde edilen bulgular, teorik beklentilerin aksine Turkiye orneginde goc akimlarinin endustri-ici ticareti azalttigini gostermektedir.

The Ottoman Empire had extensive economic relations with Africa which provides the structural frameworks for the speedy acceleration of economic partnership and trade interactions between Africa and modern Turkey. This study seeks to examine the structural relevance, challenges and prospects of Turkey’s economic relations and interest in Africa from the traditional period of Ottoman Empire to the contemporary era of competitive interdependence. From a broad perspective, trade interactions between Turkey was driven but the values of economic pluralism and less of colonialist tendencies. Therefore, the greatest challenge that tacitly limits the geometric expansion of trade is the shift in perception of Africa as a hub for disease, economic stagnation, waste and wars. This form of stereotype is a direct input of neo-colonial propaganda adopted by the Western media to keep at bay competitive investors from Africa. So, Africa with an economic growth rate of over 5% offers Turkey new horizon for economic diversification. The consistent use of soft power by Turkey has brought new image and perception of Turkey as a credible economic partner with pragmatic approach promote symbiotic trade relations devoid of the manipulative devices of free market syndrome that benefits only the West at the detriment of Africa. Africa sees Turkey as an economic partner that will assist the continent to intensify the industrialization of its economic base in line with the global economic configuration. Therefore, Turkey-Africa economic partnership and trade volume is likely to expand in future because Turkey’s opening to Africa has created new markets and investment potential that will increase Africa’s participation in global economy and enhance Turkey’s role as a major player in the politics of resource allocation in the international economic system.

Summary This work investigates the impact of importing, exporting, and two-way trading on firm labor demand in Turkish manufacturing. Adopting Multiple Propensity Score Matching techniques and Difference in Difference estimator, we support the positive internationalization impact on firm employment for an emergent country. Our evidence reveals the existence of complementarity effects between exports and imports, which is strengthened for high trade intensity firms. Furthermore, only high intensity exporting seems to promote the workforce skill upgrading in terms of an increase in the R&D worker share. The employment creation effect of firm internationalization reflects its large positive impact on firm production scale.