Trade Technology and Employment: A case Study of South Africa

John Dunne and Lawrence Edwards

No 602, Working Papers from Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol

Abstract: This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of trade on employment in South Africa. Firstly, it considers the correlation between trade liberalisation and factor demand in South African manufacturing during the 1990s. Secondly, it investigates the impact of trade on labour using a Chenery (1979) style decomposition technique, following Edwards (2001a, 2001b, 2005b) and Jenkins (2002). It develops the earlier work by exploring both the indirect and the indirect effects and investigating variations in the regional impact of trade on factor demand during the 1990s. This suggests that technological change accounts for the bulk of jobs lost in manufacturing during the 1990s. To investigate, whether this reflects exogenous technological change or trade-induced technological change requires undertaking an econometric analysis and this explores the impact of trade on technological change through an induced labour demand model. This finds a strong effect of exogenous technological progress but only limited evidence that increased trade flows and trade liberalisation induced improvements in labour productivity.

Keywords: Trade; technology; employment; industrial panel (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2006-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://carecon.org.uk/DPs/0602.pdf First version, 2006 (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:uwe:wpaper:0602

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jo Michell ().