Rapid trade liberalisation can exert profound effects on labour markets. Domestic firms, to sustain competitiveness for survival, could react through cutting labour benefits to achieve cost reductions. Alternatively, trade liberalisation may alter the industry composition of firms changing the aggregate formality rates. This paper studies the relationship between trade liberalisation and inform...

I argue that increased foreign competition can affect technical choice and skill differentials even when actual imports do not rise significantly. I present a model 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 stylise...

This paper proposes and evaluates a mechanism through which imports of unskilled intermediates (offshoring) benefit both skilled and unskilled workers by inducing capital deepening and innovation in developed countries. Data for manufacturing industries in the US over 1974-2005, show that although offshoring increases inequality between skilled and unskilled workers, unskilled workers also gain...

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The Welfare Effects of Globalization with Labor Market Regulation I examine how globalization affects wages and welfare in a general equilibrium model of international trade with partly oligopolistic markets. Globalization is modeled as reducing trade costs or opening up shielded sectors to trade. There is a national or international common agency that determines minimum wages for the oligopoli...

In our general equilibrium model, the variety of specialized service links affects international production fragmentation in manufacturing. Decreases in cost of education or fixed cost of service links raise the relative supply of skilled workers, increase service specialization, and decrease the price of aggregate services. Consequently, the market for serviceand skill-intensive component manu...

This paper reviews both multi-country and country studies on the impact of trade liberalization on growth and employment in developing countries. These studies reveal sharply contrasting effects of trade liberalization on employment, suggesting that country-specifi c and contingent factors are important. In particular, differences in how trade liberalization is implemented are particularly impo...

This paper infers the terms of trade effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) implemented in the 1990s. We estimate large FTA effects on bilateral trade volume in 2 digit manufacturing goods from 1990-2002, using panel data gravity methods to resolve two way causality. The terms of trade changes implied by these volume effects are deduced for 40 countries plus a rest-of-the-world aggregate using...

Recent papers show that imperfect property rights to a natural resource–a sector-specific factor– can be a source of comparative advantage. In these models, weaker property rights attract labor–the only mobile factor– to the resource sector, increasing the country’s comparative advantage for that sector. If capital in addition to labor is mobile, and if the benefits of capital are non-excludabl...

This paper describes the methodology used to introduce thermography as new inspection method for composite parts in aircraft maintenance. It is here focused on two main topics : control of leading edge flaps of Belgian F16 (mainly due to ageing aircraft) and inspection of main and tail rotor blades of Belgian A109 Agusta helicopters. The new idea is to use typical military thermal imagers initi...