Download or read book International Trade and Wage Inequality in the United States written by Jeffrey D. Sachs and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blue Collar Blues written by Robert Z Lawrence and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International trade accounts for only a small share of growing income inequality and labor-market displacement in the United States. Lawrence deconstructs the gap in real blue-collar wages and labor productivity growth between 1981 and 2006 and estimates how much higher these wages might have been had income growth been distributed proportionately and how much of the gap is due to measurement and technical factors about which little can be done. While increased trade with developing countries may have played some part in causing greater inequality in the 1980s, surprisingly, over the past decade the impact of such trade on inequality has been relatively small. Many imports are no longer produced in the United States, and US goods and services that do compete with imports are not particularly intensive in unskilled labor. Rising income inequality and slow real wage growth since 2000 reflect strong profit growth, much of which may be cyclical, and dramatic income gains for the top 1 percent of wage earners, a development that is more closely related to asset-market performance and technological and institutional innovations rather than conventional trade in goods and services. The minor role of trade, therefore, suggests that any policy that focuses narrowly on trade to deal with wage inequality and job loss is likely to be ineffective. Instead, policymakers should (a) use the tax system to improve income distribution and (b) implement adjustment policies to deal more generally with worker and community dislocation.
Download or read book The Impact of International Trade on Wages written by Robert C. Feenstra and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing debate among policymakers and economists. Two competing theories have emerged to explain this phenomenon, one focusing on international trade and labor market globalization as the driving force behind the devaluation of low-skill jobs, and the other focusing on the role of technological change as a catalyst for the escalation of high-skill wages. This collection brings together innovative new ideas and data sources in order to provide more satisfying alternatives to the trade versus technology debate and to assess directly the specific impact of international trade on U.S. wages. This timely volume offers a thorough appraisal of the wage distribution predicament, examining the continued effects of technology and globalization on the labor market.
Download or read book International Trade and Wage Discrimination written by Yana van der Meulen Rodgers and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the impact of competition from international trade on wage discrimination by sex in two highly open economies. If discrimination is costly, as posited in neoclassical theory based on Becker (1959), then increased industry competitiveness from international trade reduces the incentive for employers to discriminate against women. Alternatively, increased international trade may contribute to employment segregation and reduced bargaining power for women to achieve wage gains. The approach centers on comparing the impact of international trade on wage discrimination in concentrated and nonconcentrated sectors. The effect of international trade competition is expected to be more pronounced in concentrated sectors, where employers can use excess profits in the absence of trade to cover the costs of discrimination. Wage discrimination is proxied by the portion of the wage gap that cannot be explained by observable skill differences between men and women. The empirical model is estimated using a rich panel data set of residual wage gaps, trade ratios, and alternative measures of domestic concentration for Taiwan (China) and the Republic of Korea during the 1980s and 1990s. Results indicate that in contrast to the implications of neoclassical theory, competition from foreign trade in concentrated industries is positively associated with wage discrimination. These results imply that concerted efforts to enforce equal pay legislation and apply effective equal opportunity legislation are crucial for ensuring that women's pay gains will match those of men in a competitive environment. This paper--a product of the Gender Division, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network--is part of a larger effort in the network to understand the impact of trade on labor markets.
Download or read book Globalization and Inequality written by Elhanan Helpman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization is not the primary cause of rising inequality. That is the conclusion of this penetrating study by Elhanan Helpman, a leading expert on international trade. If we wish to curb inequality while protecting what is best about globalization, he shows, we must start with a clear view of how globalization does, and does not, shape our world.
Download or read book Education Skills and Technical Change written by Charles R. Hulten and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-01-11 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past few decades, US business and industry have been transformed by the advances and redundancies produced by the knowledge economy. The workplace has changed, and much of the work differs from that performed by previous generations. Can human capital accumulation in the United States keep pace with the evolving demands placed on it, and how can the workforce of tomorrow acquire the skills and competencies that are most in demand? Education, Skills, and Technical Change explores various facets of these questions and provides an overview of educational attainment in the United States and the channels through which labor force skills and education affect GDP growth. Contributors to this volume focus on a range of educational and training institutions and bring new data to bear on how we understand the role of college and vocational education and the size and nature of the skills gap. This work links a range of research areas—such as growth accounting, skill development, higher education, and immigration—and also examines how well students are being prepared for the current and future world of work.
Download or read book Trade and Income Distribution written by William R. Cline and published by Peterson Institute. This book was released on 1997 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cline also finds that trade liberalization has tended to raise skilled wages rather than reduce unskilled wages. Moreover, its impact has probably been no larger than falling transport and communication costs. Most importantly for policy, model simulations for the future show more limited trade impact than in the past and little unequalizing impact of further trade liberalization. Book jacket."--Jacket.
Download or read book Wage Inequality in Latin America written by Julián Messina and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused the decline in wage inequality of the 2000s in Latin America? Looking to the future, will the current economic slowdown be regressive? Wage Inequality in Latin America: Understanding the Past to Prepare for the Future addresses these two questions by reviewing relevant literature and providing new evidence on what we know from the conceptual, empirical, and policy perspectives. The answer to the fi rst question can be broken down into several parts, although the bottom line is that the changes in wage inequality resulted from a combination of three forces: (a) education expansion and its eff ect on falling returns to skill (the supply-side story); (b) shifts in aggregate domestic demand; and (c) exchange rate appreciation from the commodity boom and the associated shift to the nontradable sector that changed interfi rm wage diff erences. Other forces had a non-negligible but secondary role in some countries, while they were not present in others. These include the rapid increase of the minimum wage and a rapid trend toward formalization of employment, which played a supporting role but only during the boom. Understanding the forces behind recent trends also helps to shed light on the second question. The analysis in this volume suggests that the economic slowdown is putting the brakes on the reduction of inequality in Latin America and will likely continue to do so—but it might not actually reverse the region’s movement toward less wage inequality.
Download or read book Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.
Download or read book Are Higher Levels of International Trade Causing an Increase in Income Inequality in Developed Countries written by Sarah Aerni and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines how increased international trade affects the own-price elasticity of the demand for labor. In a seminal work, Dani Rodrik (1997) hypothesizes that reducing trade barriers causes this elasticity to rise, as domestic firms are more able to substitute foreign labor for domestic labor. The empirical results show that the elasticities have not changed dramatically over the last two decades while trade has greatly expanded. This conclusion implies that the early empirical work done by M. Slaughter (1997) is not very robust and prompts further questions about the actual causes of the increasing wage gap in developed countries.
Download or read book Understanding Wage Inequality written by Ch'ŏl Chŏng and published by 대외경제정책연구원. This book was released on 2007 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the trend of the wage inequality and the metropolitan wage premium in the United States during the 1980s. Two distinct sets of literature documented that the wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers and the metropolitan wage premium have risen significantly during the decade. When we combine these two sets of evidence and consider the interaction between skill and location, however, the increasing trends of the skill wage gap and the metropolitan wage premium almost disappear. Most of the dynamic changes are picked up by the interaction term, an extra metropolitan wage premium for skill, which rises significantly over the decade. As a partial explanation we find an increasing trend of the skill wage inequality across industries and occupations within metropolitan areas relative to non-metropolitan areas. This finding suggests that the skill biased technology alone may not sufficiently explain the growing wage inequality and it can be interpreted as a metropolitan specific phenomenon to an extent.
Download or read book The Changing Distribution of Income in an Open U S Economy written by J.H. Bergstrand and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There have been dramatic changes in the distribution of earnings and income in the United States during recent years. This volume presents original papers, contributed by eminent economists, on the measurement and causes of growing income inequality in the U.S. and other major industrialized countries. The first part examines the definition of income, decomposition of earnings into capacity and capacity utilization rates, and alternative methodologies for estimating income and earnings dispersion. The second part investigates theoretically or empirically alternative causes of income inequality: international trade, macroeconomic conditions and policies, technological progress, productivity growth, institutions, demographic labor supply, and sectoral labor demand. In the final part of the volume policy implications and recommendations are discussed. The volume will be valuable for academic departments (economics, political science, sociology); economic policy institutes and Federal Reserve Bank research departments; economists in government.
Download or read book Growing Apart written by Albert Fishlow and published by Council on Foreign Relations. This book was released on 1999 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book joins the debate with a robust defense of the principle and practice of free trade in the United States."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Income Inequality written by Brian Keeley and published by Org. for Economic Cooperation & Development. This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Income inequality is rising. A quarter of a century ago, the average disposable income of the richest 10% in OECD countries was around seven times higher than that of the poorest 10%; today, it's around 9½ times higher. Why does this matter? Many fear this widening gap is hurting individuals, societies and even economies. This book explores income inequality across five main headings. It starts by explaining some key terms in the inequality debate. It then examines recent trends and explains why income inequality varies between countries. Next it looks at why income gaps are growing and, in particular, at the rise of the 1%. It then looks at the consequences, including research that suggests widening inequality could hurt economic growth. Finally, it examines policies for addressing inequality and making economies more inclusive.
Download or read book Immigration and the Work Force written by George J. Borjas and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1970s, the striking increase in immigration to the United States has been accompanied by a marked change in the composition of the immigrant community, with a much higher percentage of foreign-born workers coming from Latin America and Asia and a dramatically lower percentage from Europe. This timely study is unique in presenting new data sets on the labor force, wage rates, and demographic conditions of both the U.S. and source-area economies through the 1980s. The contributors analyze the economic effects of immigration on the United States and selected source areas, with a focus on Puerto Rico and El Salvador. They examine the education and job performance of foreign-born workers; assimilation, fertility, and wage rates; and the impact of remittances by immigrants to family members on the overall gross domestic product of source areas. A revealing and original examination of a topic of growing importance, this book will stand as a guide for further research on immigration and on the economies of developing countries.
Download or read book Does Trade and Technology Transmission Facilitate Inequality Convergence An Inquiry Into the Role of Technology in Reducing the Poverty of Nations written by Gouranga Gopal Das and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2007 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on stylized evidence showing variation of the Gini coefficient of income inequality across skill cohorts and on the rapid rise in trade in technology-intensive goods, the ripple effects of technology transmission and income inequality are explored in a global Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) framework. An exogenous technology shock transmitted via trade from the United States induces productivity growth in developing regions. This spillover capture-aided by absorptive capability, better governance and institutions, technological symmetry and social acceptance-causes income to increase and income inequality to decline. The conjoined parameters retard growth's inequality-enhancing effect and thus facilitate long-run convergence of inequality between nations.
Download or read book International Trade Liberalization and Gender Wage Inequality written by Lisa B. Meyer and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: