Trade and Wage Inequality in Developing Countries: South-South Trade Matter

The relationship between trade liberalization and inequality has received considerable attention in recent years. The primary purpose of this paper is to present new results on the sources of wage inequalities in manufacturing taking into account South-South (S-S) trade. Globalization not only leads to increasing North-South (N-S) trade, but the direction and composition of trade has also changed. More trade is carried out between developing countries. We observe increasing wage inequality is more due to the South-South trade liberalization than to the classical trade liberalization with northern countries. The second purpose is to elucidate the link between the direction of trade and technological change, arguing that it might explain why we obtain different results for South-South trade and North-South trade on wage inequality. A part of this increasing wage inequality due to S-S trade comes from the development of N-S trade relationship in S-S trade which increases wage inequality in middle income developing countries. However the fact that S-S trade is more skill intensive sector oriented increase wage inequality for all developing countries.international trade, Wage Inequality, Skill-biased technical change

Is the concept of sustainable tourism sustainable? Developing the Sustainable Tourism Benchmarking Tool

Given the complexity of the issues surrounding the concept of sustainable tourism, the current paper tries to provide a unified methodology to assess tourism sustainability, based on a number of quantitative indicators. The proposed methodological framework (Sustainable Tourism Benchmarking Tool – STBT) will provide a number of benchmarks against which the sustainability of tourism activities in various countries can be assessed. A model development procedure is proposed: identification of the dimensions (economic, socio-ecologic, infrastructure) and indicators, method of scaling, chart representation and evaluation on three Asian countries. This application to three countries show us that a similar level of tourism activity might induce different sort of improvements to implement in the tourism activity and might have different consequences for the socio-ecological environment. The heterogeneity of developing countries exposed in the STBT is useful to detect the main problem of each country in their tourism activity.

Les délocalisations françaises vers la Turquie

De 1980 à 2002, l'industrie française a perdu 1 500 000 emplois. La croissance des importations en provenance des pays émergents dans les secteurs ayant perdu le plus d'emplois suggère que les délocalisations et le commerce avec ces pays pourraient en être responsables. Dans le même temps, la France a fortement développé ses liens avec les pays émergents. En 2000, 10 % des investissements directs étrangers français étaient à destination de ces pays, qui représentent 16 % des importations de biens manufacturés et 19 % des exportations. La Turquie a bénéficié de ce phénomène d'ouverture vers les pays émergents et contribue à 0,8 % des importations françaises de biens industriels, tout en recevant 0,4 % des investissements français à l'étranger. L'ampleur et la nocivité des délocalisations font l'objet de débats. Pour certains, les délocalisations sont peu importantes et les pertes d'emplois industriels dues à des mécanismes normaux de gains de productivité et de spécialisation. Pour d'autres, elles sont un facteur majeur de pertes d'emplois. L'analyse présentée ici portera plutôt sur le secteur industriel que sur celui des services

Openness and Inequality in Developing Countries: A New Look at the Evidence

Integration to world markets is expected to help developing countries to access prosperity. At the same time, increasing opportunities to trade are likely to affect income distribution and whether or not increasing openness to trade is accompanied by a reduction or an increase inequality is highly controversial. This paper brings new evidence on this issue in using a data set covering a large sample of developing countries and a model with improved controls for omitted variables and a new index of trade openness. Trade liberalization increases inequality in countries that relatively well-endowed in capital. Our model assumes that it might be fruitful to breakdown unskilled labor into non-educated and primary-educated as suggested by Wood (1994). The results show that trade liberalization increases inequality in highly educated abundant countries whereas it decreases inequality in primary educated abundant countries. However it increases inequality in non educated abundant countries, suggesting that this part of population does not benefit from trade openness since it is not included in export oriented sectors.International Trade; Income Distribution; Poverty

Les délocalisations françaises vers la Turquie

De 1980 à 2002, l’industrie française a perdu 1 500 000 emplois. La croissance des importations en provenance des pays émergents dans les secteurs ayant perdu le plus d’emplois suggère que les délocalisations et le commerce avec ces pays pourraient en être responsables. Dans le même temps, la France a fortement développé ses liens avec les pays émergents. En 2000, 10 % des investissements directs étrangers français étaient à destination de ces pays, qui représentent 16 % des importations de biens manufacturés et 19 % des exportations. La Turquie a bénéficié de ce phénomène d’ouverture vers les pays émergents et contribue à 0,8 % des importations françaises de biens industriels, tout en recevant 0,4 % des investissements français à l’étranger. L’ampleur et la nocivité des délocalisations font l’objet de débats. Pour certains, les délocalisations sont peu importantes et les pertes d’emplois industriels dues à des mécanismes normaux de gains de productivité et de spécialisation. Pour d’autres, elles sont un facteur majeur de pertes d’emplois. L’analyse présentée ici portera plutôt sur le secteur industriel que sur celui des services.

Regional integration and natural resources : who benefits ? evidence from MENA

This paper builds on theoretical predictions that show that gains from regional integration are unevenly distributed between resource rich and poor countries. It explores the effects of different integration schemes in the Middle East and North Africa. The results suggest that within the Pan Arab Free Trade Agreement, there is significant trade creation for resource poor countries associated with regional integration, and no evidence of trade diversion. In resource rich countries, however, there is evidence of pure trade diversion in both resource-rich/labor-abundant countries and resource-rich/labor-importing countries. This underscores the idea that regional integration can help to spread the benefits of unevenly distributed resource wealth among the region's economies.Free Trade,Trade Law,Trade Policy,Economic Theory&Research,Trade and Regional Integration

Openness and Inequality in Developing Countries: a New Look at the Evidence

Integration to world markets is expected to help developing countries to access prosperity. At the same time, increasing opportunities to trade are likely to affect income distribution and whether or not increasing openness to trade is accompanied by a reduction or an increase inequality is highly controversial. This paper brings new evidence on this issue in using a data set covering a large sample of developing countries and a model with improved controls for omitted variables and a new index of trade openness. Trade liberalization increases inequality in countries that relatively well-endowed in capital. Our model assumes that it might be fruitful to breakdown unskilled labor into non-educated and primary-educated as suggested by Wood (1994). The results show that trade liberalization increases inequality in highly educated abundant countries whereas it decreases inequality in primary educated abundant countries. However it increases inequality in non educated abundant countries, suggesting that this part of population does not benefit from trade openness since it is not included in export oriented sectors.international trade;Income distribution;Poverty

Explaining Trade Flows: Traditional and New Determinants of Trade Patterns

An empirical tradition in international trade seeks to establish whether the predictions of factor abundance theory match with the data. The relation between factor endowments and trade in goods (commodity version of Hecksher-Ohlin) provide mildly encouraging empirical results. But in the analysis of factor service trade and factor endowments (factor content version of HO), the results show that it performs poorly and reject strict HOV models in favor of modifications that allow for technology differences, consumer’s preferences differences, increasing returns to scale or cost of trade. In this paper we test if these “new” determinants help us to improve our estimation of trade patterns in commodities. Since the commodity version allows obtaining a large panel data we also compare two periods, pre and post 1980. We use a Heckman procedure to allow for non linearity in the relation between factors endowments and net exports and between trade intensity and net exports. The results show that adding the “new” determinants of factor content studies help us to improve the prediction of being specialized in the different manufactured products. However specialization according to factor endowments is stronger than ever, especially concerning the specialization according to human capital endowment. Trade patterns are also determined by trade intensity. Here differences in technology, trade policy, transport and transaction costs, explain the difference in trade intensity.international trade, Hecksher-Ohlin Model

Les délocalisations françaises vers la Turquie

De 1980 à 2002, l'industrie française a perdu 1 500 000 emplois. La croissance des importations en provenance des pays émergents dans les secteurs ayant perdu le plus d'emplois suggère que les délocalisations et le commerce avec ces pays pourraient en être responsables. Dans le même temps, la France a fortement développé ses liens avec les pays émergents. En 2000, 10 % des investissements directs étrangers français étaient à destination de ces pays, qui représentent 16 % des importations de biens manufacturés et 19 % des exportations. La Turquie a bénéficié de ce phénomène d'ouverture vers les pays émergents et contribue à 0,8 % des importations françaises de biens industriels, tout en recevant 0,4 % des investissements français à l'étranger. L'ampleur et la nocivité des délocalisations font l'objet de débats. Pour certains, les délocalisations sont peu importantes et les pertes d'emplois industriels dues à des mécanismes normaux de gains de productivité et de spécialisation. Pour d'autres, elles sont un facteur majeur de pertes d'emplois. L'analyse présentée ici portera plutôt sur le secteur industriel que sur celui des services.cerdi ; Turquie

Openness and Inequality in Developing Countries: a New Look at the Evidence

Integration to world markets is expected to help developing countries to access prosperity. At the same time, increasing opportunities to trade are likely to affect income distribution and whether or not increasing openness to trade is accompanied by a reduction or an increase inequality is highly controversial. This paper brings new evidence on this issue in using a data set covering a large sample of developing countries and a model with improved controls for omitted variables and a new index of trade openness. Trade liberalization increases inequality in countries that relatively well-endowed in capital. Our model assumes that it might be fruitful to breakdown unskilled labor into non-educated and primary-educated as suggested by Wood (1994). The results show that trade liberalization increases inequality in highly educated abundant countries whereas it decreases inequality in primary educated abundant countries. However it increases inequality in non educated abundant countries, suggesting that this part of population does not benefit from trade openness since it is not included in export oriented sectors.international trade, Income distribution, Poverty