Openness and Inequality in Developing Countries: a New Look at the Evidence

Julien Gourdon

CERDI Working papers from HAL

Abstract: Integration to world markets is expected to help developing countries to access prosperity. At the same time, increasing opportunities to trade are likely to affect income distribution and whether or not increasing openness to trade is accompanied by a reduction or an increase inequality is highly controversial. This paper brings new evidence on this issue in using a data set covering a large sample of developing countries and a model with improved controls for omitted variables and a new index of trade openness. Trade liberalization increases inequality in countries that relatively well-endowed in capital. Our model assumes that it might be fruitful to breakdown unskilled labor into non-educated and primary-educated as suggested by Wood (1994). The results show that trade liberalization increases inequality in highly educated abundant countries whereas it decreases inequality in primary educated abundant countries. However it increases inequality in non educated abundant countries, suggesting that this part of population does not benefit from trade openness since it is not included in export oriented sectors.

Keywords: international trade; Income distribution; Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01-18
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00557117
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00557117/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Openness and Inequality in Developing Countries: a New Look at the Evidence (2007)
Working Paper: Openness and Inequality in Developing Countries: A New Look at the Evidence (2006)
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:hal:cdiwps:halshs-00557117

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERDI Working papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Contact - CERDI - Université Clermont Auvergne ().