Effect of Trade on the Demand for Skilled and Unskilled Workers

Chinkook Lee and Gerald Schluter ()

Economic Systems Research, 1999, vol. 11, issue 1, 49-66

Abstract: We use an input-output model to examine the effects of trade and domestic consumption, technology and labor productivity on skilled and unskilled worker demand. We found that trade was not the major contributor to changes in demand for skilled and unskilled labor during 1972-92, counter to the continuing debate on the trade-widening wage gap linkage. We found that skill intensity, i.e. the ratio of high-skilled to low-skilled workers for exports compared with imports, exceeded one during 1972-92, but did not increase. We explore alternative definitions of skilled and unskilled, and find our results to be robust to these alternative definitions.

Keywords: Skill intensity of US trade; international trade impacts; skilled—unskilled wage gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1080/09535319900000005

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