Trade's Impact on the Labor Share: Evidence from German and Italian Regions

Claudia Buch, Paola Monti and Farid Toubal

No 46, IAW Discussion Papers from Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW)

Abstract: Has the labor share declined? And what is the impact of international trade? These questions are not only relevant in an international context they also matter for understanding the regional distribution of incomes in a given country. In this paper, we study two regions with trade exposures that differ from the rest of the country, and which display distinct changes in the labor share. East German and Southern Italian regions have a degree of international openness which is below the countries’ averages. At the same time, there has been a more pronounced decline in the labor share in East Germany than in West Germany. In Southern Italy, the labor share has increased in recent years. We show that increased trade openness is not the main culprit behind changing labor shares.

Keywords: labor share; trade; regions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E25 F10 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-int and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaw.edu/RePEc/iaw/pdf/iaw_dp_46.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iaw:iawdip:46

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAW Discussion Papers from Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rolf Kleimann ().