Why Do People Dislike Low-Wage Trade Competition with Posted Workers in the Service Sector?

Lars Calmfors, Girts Dimdins, Marie Gustafsson Sendén, Henry Montgomery and Ulrika Stavlöt

No 3842, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The issue of low-wage competition in services trade involving posted workers is controversial in the EU. Using Swedish survey data, people’s attitudes are found to be more negative to such trade than to goods trade. The differences depend on both a preference for favouring social groups to which individuals belong (here the domestic population) and altruistic justice concerns for foreign workers. In small-group experiments we find a tendency for people to adjust their evaluations of various aspects of trade to their general attitude. This tendency is stronger for those opposed to than those in favour of low-wage trade competition. This may indicate that the former group forms its attitudes in a less rational way than the latter group.

Keywords: services trade; posted workers; wage regulations; attitude formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 F16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3842.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

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:ces:ceswps:_3842

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().