Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/51828 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5597
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
In the last decades, international trade has increased between industrialised countries and between high- and low-wage countries. This important change has raised questions on how international trade affects the labour market. In this spirit, this paper aims to investigate the impact of international trade on wage dispersion in a small open economy. It is one of the few to: i) use detailed matched employer-employee data to compute industry wage premia and disaggregated industry level panel data to examine the impact of changes in international trade on changes in wage differentials, ii) simultaneously analyse both imports and exports, and iii) examine the impact of imports according to the country of origin. Looking at the export side, we find (on the basis of the system GMM estimator) a positive effect of exports on industry wage premia. The results also show that import penetration has a significant and negative impact on industry wage differentials whatever the country of origin. However, the country of origin appears to matter quite a lot. Indeed, the detrimental effect of imports on wages is found to be significantly bigger when the latter come from low-income countries than from high-income countries.
Subjects: 
wage structure
inter-industry wage differentials
international trade
matched employer-employee data
JEL: 
F16
J31
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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