Technological Differences and the Impact of Trade on Wages

We introduce technological differences in a Heckscher-Ohlin model and study how the technology and endowment differences interact to determine the effects of trade on factor prices. When the endowment effect is dominant in determining the autarky relative factor prices, the relative factor prices of trading countries adjust in converging directions with trade if and only if the capital-rich country has a comparative advantage in the capital-intensive sector. Adjustments in converging directions could be excessive. Relative factor prices tend to converge if the technological comparative advantage is small for given relative endowments or if the relative endowment difference is large for a given technological comparative advantage.factor-price convergence, comparative advantage, technological comparative advantage, skill premium

Productivity Growth in the 1990s: Technology, Utilization, or Adjustment?

Measured productivity growth increased substantially during the second half of the 1990s. This paper examines whether this increase owes to an increase in the rate of technological change or whether it can be explained by non-technological factors relating to factor utilization, factor accumulation, or returns to scale. It finds that the recent increase in productivity growth does appear to arise from an increase in technological change. Cyclical utilization raised measured productivity growth relative to technology growth in the first part of the expansion, but lowered it subsequently. Factor adjustment leads to a steady-state understatement of technology growth by measured productivity growth. The understatement was greater in the second half of the expansion than the first. Changes in the distribution of inputs across industries with different returns to scale lead to a modest understatement in the growth in technology. Although the increase technological change is most pronounced in durable manufacturing, technological change also increased outside of manufacturing.

Technological Capabilities Asymmetries in Latin American and the Caribbean

This paper analyzes the convergence process in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1960-2005 period. The evidence is not favorable to clear convergence or divergence trends, but to a slight process of convergence until the 1970s, and then global divergence. In turn, the results suggest the existence of transitory clubs of convergence during the 1960-1974 and 1990-1994 periods. After that, the lower income economies showed convergence to the relative richer countries, but in a context of increasing dispersion of the per capita income. The development accounting and the decomposition of the total factor productivity (TFP) indicate that those results are mainly explained by relative differences in the technological capabilities, and that the existence of structural differences is a key factor to explain the nonconvergence in technological capabilities. The efforts to integrate the economies were not enough to reduce the gap but the divergence in technological capabilities would have been worst without the integration process.Convergence; Total Factor Productivity Decomposition; Technological Capabilities; Economic Integration; Latin American and the Caribbean

Trade Technology and Employment: A case Study of South Africa

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.Trade; technology; employment; industrial panel

Equilibrium Bias of Technology

The study of the bias of new technologies is important both as part of the analysis of the nature of technology adoption and the direction of technological change, and to understand the distributional implications of new technologies. In this paper, I analyze the equilibrium bias of technology. I distinguish between the relative bias of technology, which concerns how the marginal product of a factor changes relative to that of another following the introduction of new technology, and the absolute bias, which looks only at the effect of new technology on the marginal product of a factor. The first part of the paper generalizes a number of existing results in the literature regarding the relative bias of technology. In particular, I show that when the menu of technological possibilities only allows for factor-augmenting technologies, the increase in the supply of a factor always induces technological change (or technology adoption) relatively biased towards that factor. This force can be strong enough to make the relative marginal product of a factor increasing in response to an increase in its supply, thus leading to an upward-sloping relative demand curve. However, I also show that the results about relative bias do not generalize when more general menus of technological possibilities are considered. In the second part of the paper, I show that there are much more general results about absolute bias. I prove that under fairly mild assumptions, an increase in the supply of a factor always induces changes in technology that are absolutely biased towards that factor, and these results hold both for small changes and large changes in supplies. Most importantly, I also determine the conditions under which the induced-technology response will be strong enough so that the price (marginal product) of a factor increases in response to an increase in its supply. These conditions correspond to a form of failure of joint concavity of the aggregate production function of the economy in factors and technology. This type of failure of joint concavity is quite possible in economies where equilibrium factor demands and technologies are decided by different agents.

Trade, Wages, and Specific Factors

In this paper, we use a multi-sector specific factors model with sector-specific capital and two mobile factors, production and non-production labor, to examine the effects of globalization on the skill premium in U.S.\ manufacturing industries. A key feature of this model is that factor-price insensitivity does not hold, and thus endowment changes and factor-specific technological change affect relative factor returns, and hence the skill premium. Using this model and data for the U.S. manufacturing sector from 1958-94, we calculate changes in the skill premium and then carry out a decomposition to identify the changes caused by globalization, technological progress, and endowment changes. We find the model to be an accurate predictor of both the direction and magnitude of changes in the skill premium. The decomposition reveals that globalization effects, working through product price changes, were small in magnitude and caused the skill premium to decline during the '70s and '80s. In contrast, changes in capital endowments had a strong positive effect on the skill premium throughout the entire sample period. Sector specific and production labor specific technological change also had a positive impact on the premium, while non-production labor specific technological change increased the premium in all decades. Finally, changes in labor endowments caused a decline in the premium during all three decades.

Production Functions for Climate Policy Modeling: An Empirical Analysis

Quantitative models for climate policy modeling differ in the production structure used and in the sizes of the elasticities of substitution. The empirical foundation for both is generally lacking. This paper estimates the parameters of two-level CES production functions with capital, labour and energy as inputs, and is the first to systematically compare all nesting structures. Using industry-level data from 12 OECD countries, we find that the nesting structure where capital and labour are combined first, fits the data best, but for most countries and industries we cannot reject that all three inputs can be put into one single nest. These two nesting structures are used by most climate models. However, while several climate policy models use a Cobb-Douglas function for (part of the) production function, we reject elasticities equal to one, in favour of considerably smaller values. Finally we find evidence for factor-specific technological change. With lower elasticities and with factor-specific technological change, some climate policy models may find a bigger effect of endogenous technological change on mitigating the costs of climate policy.Climate Policy, Input Substitution, Technological Change

A Variant of Uzawa's Theorem

Uzawa (1961) has shown that balanced growth requires technological progress to be strictly Harrod neutral (purely labor-augmenting). This paper offers a slightly more general variant of the theorem that does not require assumptions about savings behavior or factor pricing and is much easier to prove.Harrod bias technological progress

Knowledge Flows and Productivity

National and international flows of knowledge are fundamental determinants of technological progress. In this article we review the existing literature on knowledge flows and we propose a method for estimating them, based on patent citations. Citations are links between inventions that reveal a learning process at the technological frontier. We use data for the period 1975-1996 for 147 subnational regions in Europe and North America. We find that geographical distance and technological differences constitute major barriers to knowledge flows. We also show that these flows may have positive, but small, effect on total factor productivity.

Dynamic Factor Demands and Technology Measurement under Arbitrary Expectations

We present a dynamic model of factor demands based on expected discounted costs min-imization. While making only very mild assumptions on expectations and technology, we are able to establish a duality relationship between contemporary factor demands and the technology, and we provide formula for easily recovering marginal products, returns to scale, and technological change from estimated factor demands. Parametrization and implementation are illustrated in a detailed example. Nous présentons un modèle dynamique de demande de facteurs de production basé sur un comportement de minimisation de l'espérance des coûts cumulatifs actualisés. Sous des hypothèses peu restrictives sur les anticipations et la technologie, nous établissons une relation de dualité entre les demandes courantes de facteurs et la technologie. Produits marginaux, rendements d'échelle et progrès technologique peuvent se calculer simplement à partir des demandes de facteurs. Nous illustrons à travers un exemple détaillé une façon de paramétriser et d'appliquer le modèle.Dynamic duality; Investment; Expectations; Expected future cost function; Factor demands; Returns to scale; Technological change - Dualité dynamique; Investissement; Anticipations; Demandes de facteurs de production; Rendements d'échelle; Progrès technique.