 TRADE, WAGES AND SKILL ACCUMULATION IN THE EMERGING GIANTSRichard Harris and Peter Robertson No 09-19, Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics Abstract: A pervasive result in the empirical “trade-wage” literature is that liberalization is associated with rising skill premiums in developing economies. Though this represents a puzzle in the context of static Heckscher-Ohlin models, the dynamic effects of trade liberalization have received little attention. To investigate these dynamic effects of trade-liberalization on the skill premium, we quantify the effect of unanticipated trade liberalization on the entire transition path of an economy, using China and India as examples. On impact trade liberalization is shown to generate large jumps in investment, education demand, and the skill premium. The path of the skill premium is also shown to be non-monotonic and changes sign over the transition. The results are shown to depend on Mincerian on-the job training costs and the degree of capital-skill complementarity. As well as providing an explanation for the skill-premium puzzle in developing economies, the results also show that trade liberalization in India and China is “pro-poor”, in that it generates strong wage growth for both skilled and unskilled labor. Keywords: Economic Growth; Intentional Trade; Skill Premium; Human Capital; Wage Inequality. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uwa:wpaper:09-19 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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