Foreign Capital and Skilled-unskilled Wage Inequality in a Developing Economy with Non-traded Goods

Sarbajit Chaudhuri and Shigemi Yabuuchi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The existing theoretical literature does not take into consideration the existence of non-traded goods and the nature of capital mobility between the traded and the non-traded sectors in analyzing the consequences of liberalized investment policies on the relative wage inequality in the developing countries. The present paper purports to fill in this gap using two four-sector general equilibrium models reasonable for a developing economy. We have found that inflows of foreign capital usually improve the wage inequality when the low-skill sector is capital-intensive. But, the relative wage gap may widen if the high-skill sector is capital-intensive. When the non-traded sector produces a non-traded final commodity wage inequality worsens if the low-skill sector is capital-intensive and employs only a very small proportion of the unskilled workforce and if the primary export sector is unskilled labour-intensive. Appropriate policy recommendations for improving the wage inequality have also been made.

Keywords: Skilled labour; unskilled labour; wage inequality; foreign capital inflows; non-traded goods; intersectoral capital mobility; labour market imperfection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-03-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2645/1/MPRA_paper_2645.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:2645

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().