Trade Liberalization and Gender Wage Inequality in Mexico

Abstract

After twenty years of trade liberalization in Mexico, the relationship between gender wage inequality and trade remains insufficiently studied, in spite of evidence of increasing numbers of women in industrial employment. This study aims to analyze the effects of export orientation and other characteristics that represent the industrial underpinnings of restructuring on gender wage inequality for 2001–5. There is consistent evidence of the negative impact of export orientation on men's and women's wages and the gender wage ratio, signifying that women lose in both absolute and relative terms. This result holds after controlling for women's share of employment and the skills of both genders, contrary to the expected effect from trade on equality. There is also a negative relation between a rise in the proportion of unskilled workers and the gender wage ratio, which suggests that the trade-induced skill hypothesis cannot be considered an adequate explanation for gender inequality.     

Gender Inequality and Economic Growth in Korea

Calibrating an endogenous‐growth model to Korean data, we analyse the impact of gender inequality in Korea on long‐term economic growth. We find that gender equality policies that lower discrimination in the labour market or that increase the time spent by a father on childrearing can contribute positively to female labour market participation and per capita income growth. The simulation results show that when the disparities between men and women at home and in the labour market are completely removed, the female labour force participation rate increases from 54.4 to 67.5%, and the growth rate in per capita income rises from 3.6 to 4.1% on average over a generation.     

Wage Inequality and Wage Mobility in Europe

Using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, this paper investigates wage inequality and wage mobility in Europe. Decomposing inequality into within‐ and between‐group inequality, we analyze to what extent wage inequality and mobility can be explained by observable characteristics. Furthermore, we investigate which individual and household characteristics determine transitions within the wage distribution. We find that overall, mobility reduces wage inequality. While a large part of wage inequality is due to unobservable characteristics, the equalizing effect of mobility mainly occurs within groups. Furthermore, both personal and household characteristics play an important role for wage transitions. Finally, our findings reveal large cross‐country differences across Europe.     

The Great Recession and Racial Inequality: Evidence from Measures of Economic Well-Being

Abstract:

The Great Recession had a tremendous impact on low-income Americans, in particular Black and Latino Americans. The losses in terms of employment and earnings are matched only by the losses in terms of real wealth. In many ways, however, these losses are merely a continuation of trends that have been unfolding for more than two decades. We examine the changes in overall economic well-being and inequality, as well as changes in racial economic inequality during and since the Great Recession. We find that the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being inequality between White and Black households decreased during the Great Recession but since 2010, racial inequality in terms of LIMEW has increased. We find that changes in base income, taxes, and income from non-home wealth during the Great Recession produced declines in overall inequality, while only taxes reduced between-group racial inequality.     

Public Sector Employment,Wage Inequality and the Gender Pay Ratio in the UK

This paper assesses the relative contributions of the different systems of pay determination in the private sector and the public sector toward the changing level of wage inequality and the gender pay ratio in the UK. The greater centralisation of pay arrangements in the public sector compared with the private sector in the UK suggests that public sector employment may have acted to offset the widening wage inequality seen in recent years, as well as making an important contribution to the increase in women's relative average earnings compared to men. This issue is addressed by drawing on unpublished occupational hourly earnings data from the New Earnings Survey and applying decomposition of the Theil index of wage inequality to analyse both static and dynamic trends. The change in wage inequality for the period 1986 to 1995 primarily reflected the change in wage dispersion within the private sector, and the narrowing of the gender pay gap among the public sector workforce was an important factor in explaining the overall improvement in women's relative earnings. The paper argues that the relatively centralised pay arrangements in the public sector, compared with the private sector, played an important role in slowing the increase in wage inequality and narrowing the gender pay gap. As such, future policies to decentralise pay determination in the UK public sector may exacerbate the increasing level of wage inequality and reverse women's recent relative pay improvements.     

Foreign Competition and Wage Inequality

The author argues that increased foreign competition can affect technical choice and skill differentials even when actual imports do not rise significantly. A model is presented of general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE) in which a reduction in import barriers (whether technological or policy–imposed) encourages more strategic investment by incumbent firms. The predictions accord with many of the stylized facts: higher skill premia; higher ratios of skilled to unskilled workers employed in all sectors and throughout the economy; little change in import volumes or prices; and rapid technological progress with rather little change in total factor productivity.     

Occupational Mobility and Wage Inequality

In this article we argue that wage inequality and occupational mobility are intimately related. We are motivated by our empirical findings that human capital is occupation specific and that the fraction of workers switching occupations in the U.S. was as high as 16% a year in the early 1970's and had increased to 21% by the mid-1990's. We develop a general equilibrium model with occupation-specific human capital and heterogeneous experience levels within occupations. We find that the model, calibrated to match the level of occupational mobility in the 1970's, accounts quite well for the level of (within-group) wage inequality in that period. Next, we find that the model, calibrated to match the increase in occupational mobility, accounts for over 90% of the increase in wage inequality between the 1970's and the 1990's. The theory is also quantitatively consistent with the level and increase in the short-term variability of earnings.     

Macroeconomic Effects of Reducing Gender Wage Inequality in an Export-Oriented, Semi-Industrialized Economy

The paper presents two short-run, structuralist models of an export-oriented, two-sector, semi-industrialized economy in which women workers are concentrated in export production. The first model analyzes the comparative static effects of an exogenous increase in female wages holding male wages and the exchange rate constant. The second model endogenizes the female–male wage ratio and the real exchange rate, assuming flexible nominal wages and a crawling-peg exchange rate. Either stable or unstable dynamics are possible. In the stable cases, a depreciation policy can either close or widen the gender wage gap.     

Gender Inequality,Endogenous Cultural Norms,and Economic Development

In this paper, I explore the joint dynamics between gender inequality and cultural norms along the process of development. Cultural norms regarding gender roles are shaped by the relative female labor supply, and thus depend on the gender gap in education. In turn, these norms influence the relative education provided to boys and girls. I show that this two‐way causality between the inegalitarian nature of norms and the educational gender gap might explain the emergence of high gender inequality and low development traps. The model also makes it possible to replicate a U‐shaped relationship between the relative status of women and the economic development.     

Economic Reforms and Gender-Based Wage Inequality in the Presence of Factor Market Distortions

A simple three-sector general equilibrium model has been developed with both male and female labour and factor market distortions. The effects of different liberalized economic policies have been examined on the gender-based wage inequality. The analysis finds that credit market reform and tariff reform produce favourable effects on the wage inequality while the liberalized investment policy becomes counterproductive. The basic model has been extended to treat domestic capital differently from foreign capital. In the extended model, all of the above results hold. Additionally, it has been found that domestic capital formation is likely to produce a favourable impact on the gender wage inequality. These results have important policy implications for a small open developing economy.

     

局部经济衰退与全球经济衰退的转换关系

把握局部经济衰退与全球经济衰退的动态转化规律对于预测经济衰退走势和合理规避风险具有重要意义.本文实证分析了1961年-2013年局部经济衰退与全球经济衰退间的转换关系.研究结论如下:首先,美、日、英三国共同的经济衰退是世界经济衰退的先导因素;其次,自20世纪90年代开始,中国、印度和巴西与发达国家的经济周期协同变动趋势开始显现,由此导致的共同衰退将直接转换为世界经济衰退;最后,东亚地区和拉美地区的局部经济衰退将通过发达国家和三个较大发展中国家间接导致全球经济衰退.此外,东亚和拉美的经济衰退之间无明显转换关系.     

General Purpose Technology and Wage Inequality

The recent changes in the US wage structure are often linked to the new wave of capital-embodied information technologies. The existing literature has emphasized either the accelerated pace or the skill-bias of embodied technical progress as the driving force behind the rise in wage inequality. A key, neglected, aspect is the general purpose nature of the new information technologies. This paper formalizes the idea of generality of technology in two ways, one related to human capital (skill transferability) and one to physical capital (vintage compatibility) and studies the impact of an increase in these two dimensions of technological generality on equilibrium wage inequality.     

Trade, Technology and UK Wage Inequality

This paper examines the impact of international trade and technical change on changes in the UK skill premium. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth. Then we relate price and TFP changes to a set of underlying forces. Among our results are (a) changes in prices, not TFP, were the major force behind the rise in inequality in the 1980s; (b) changes in OECD prices and UK tariffs significantly raised 1980s skill premia through their effects on prices, and that industry concentration significantly raised 1980s skill premia through its effect on TFP.     

Trade and Labor Approaches to Wage Inequality

The paper compares the trade and labor approaches to wage inequality. It first looks at the theoretical differences, stressing the different roles ascribed to sector and factor bias, labor supply and the theory of technical change in trade models with endogenous prices. It then briefly reviews some of the evidence on the sector bias of prices and technology.     

Globalization,Worker Mobility and Wage Inequality

In the present paper, I integrate frictional labor markets with on‐the‐job search into an otherwise standard heterogeneous firm model of intra‐industry trade. Most importantly, I show that the returns to workers' inter‐firm mobility are higher in a trade equilibrium than in autarky. Intuitively, by favoring large and productive firms, international trade amplifies the disparities in profitability between small and large firms. Hence, the returns to labor reallocation across firms rise. In view of the empirically observed higher inter‐firm mobility among high‐skill workers, this suggests a skill‐biased impact of trade liberalization.     

外包、创新与工资不平等

本文构建了一个纳入发达国家创新活动的外包模型,来研究发达国家对发展中国家的外包转移,对发达国家和发展中国家之间的工资不平等以及作为发包方的发达国家企业创新活动的影响.我们发现,外包转移活动中不同因素对发达国家和发展中国家之间的工资不平等有着较为复杂的影响效应;更为重要是,发达国家对发展中国家的外包转移程度越大,越能激励作为发包方的发达国家企业的创新活动.进一步,考虑到作为外包转移接受方的发展中国家之间普遍存在的模仿行为特征,在外包模型中引入了发展中国家企业之间的模仿系数.模型结果表明,发展中国家代工企业之间的模仿程度越大,则会缩小发达国家和发展中国家之间的工资不平等;而且,作为代工方的发展中国家企业之间的模仿程度越大,越能激励作为发包方的发达国家企业的创新活动,越能激励发达国家对发展中国家的外包转移.本文的结论对于重新思考与理解外包活动对作为发包方的发达国家和作为接包方的发展中国家所具有的复杂影响效应,无疑具有非常直接的现实政策含义.     

Emigration,Finite Changes and Wage Inequality

This article shows that large outmigration of labor leads to finite changes in the structure of production at source. We argue that sectors may vanish as they cannot pay higher wages consequent to emigration. We also inquire whether emigration of one type of labor hurts the other non‐emigrating type in this setup. Various situations when real incomes of the emigrating and the non‐emigrating types do not move together are demonstrated. This generalizes some of the existing results in the literature. In particular, emigration can lead to a drastic change in the degree of inequality depending on which of the sectors survive in the postemigration regime.     

技能溢价与工资不平等理论研究进展

尽管技能偏向性技术进步假说为理解技能溢价和工资不平等提供了一个较好的分析框架,但依然存在不一致的研究结果.争议主要集中在资本与技能之间的互补关系、劳动力市场制度变迁以及技术和贸易哪一个是造成收入差距拉大的主要原因等几个方面.未来的研究将会建立一个统一的理论框架,分析各因素在解释工资不均衡程度增加时的相互作用.     

Gender Inequality and Trade*

The paper empirically explores the international linkages between gender inequality and trade flows of a sample of 92 developed and developing countries. The focus is on comparative advantage in labor‐intensive manufactured goods. The results indicate that gender wage inequality is positively associated with comparative advantage in labor‐intensive goods, i.e. countries with a larger gender wage gap have higher exports of these goods. Also, gender inequality in labor force activity rates and educational attainment rates are negatively linked with comparative advantage in labor‐intensive commodities.     

Product Market Integration,Rents and Wage Inequality

Globalization in the form of product market integration affects labor markets and produces winners and losers. While there are aggregate gains, it is in general ambiguous how inequality is affected. We explore this issue in a Ricardian model and show that it depends on the balance between “protection” and “specialization” rents. In particular, wage inequality among similar workers (residual wage inequality) may be U ‐shaped, at first decreasing and then increasing in the process of product market integration. Consequently, there may be gains in both the efficiency and the equity dimension until integration reaches a certain level at which a trade‐off arises.