Globalization, Roundaboutness, and Relative Wages

We depart from the trade and wages literature and its emphasis on North-South trade, examining North-North by developing the basic linkages between trade-based integration and relative wages in an Ethier-type division of labor model. Using this model we identify a formal relationship between international trade, productivity, and wages. We then examine the trivariate relationship between trade, growth in total factor productivity (TFP), and the skill premium in a vector autoregression framework. We find evidence of a long-run relationship between growth in intermediate goods and changes in TFP. Controlling for this relationship we also find a positive relationship between trade and the skill-premium

Fragmentation, Globalization and Labor Markets

Fragmentation of the value-added-chain is modeled as the reaction of monopolistically competitive firms to the removal of barriers to trade and factor mobility in an integrated trading environment. Since fragmentation requires high-skilled labor, this form of globalization can induce labor market effects similar to those caused by skill-biased technical change. In the short run, it is likely that fragmentation will be accompanied by an increase in high and low-skilled service employment as well as in the skilled wage premia, as observed in OECD countries. These implications can be reversed, however, as new firms enter the market

Cost Competition, Fragmentation and Globalization

This paper proposes a model in which the removal of barriers to trade and factor mobility is associated with endogenous fragmentation of the value-added chain. Fragmentation is the outcome of cost competition – the profit-maximizing choice of cost structure by monopolistically competitive firms. An expansion of the integrated trading area can induce globalization not only in the horizontal dimension associated with love-of-variety preferences, but also vertically as firms vary specialization of production stages. While increased trade is likely to induce fragmentation when the number of firms is fixed, free entry can either reverse or intensify this result

Industrial location and economic integration : centrifugal and centripetal forces in the new Europe

Indeks Bibliografi hlm. 160-187ix, 193 hlm. : il. ; 23 cm