In this important and topical book, Adrian Wood demonstrates that recent changes in North-South trade have had a far larger impact on labor markets than earlier studies imply, altering the relative demand for skilled and unskilled workers in the two regions. Developing his argument by incorporating three fields of economics--international, labor, and development--he suggests policies that could reduce the resulting social dislocation in the North, without jeopardizing world trade or economic progress in the South. Wood argues that there are grounds for qualified eptimism despite this problem. Greater trade should mean greater prosperity for developing countries, and less global inequality, while for developed countries it should mean workers are available to produce sophisticated exports, which the South cannot produce. Northern governments must take action to avoid the situation of rising unemployment and protectionism in the North, and exploitation of labor in the South. Wood argues that this can be done not through protectionism, but through investment in education and training to raise the supply of skilled labor.

Drawing on three fields of economics (international, labour, and development), this study shows that expansion of North-South trade in manufactures has had a far greater impact on labour markets than earlier work suggested. In the South, unskilled workers have benefited most from this trade, but in the North, the gains have been concentrated on skilled labour, while unskilled workers have suffered falling wages and rising unemployment. This decline in the economic position of unskilled workers has increased inequality, and aggravated crime and other forms of social erosion, on both sides of the Atlantic. The failure of Northern governments to recognize that trade with the South has these adverse side-effects, and to take appropriate counter-measures, has fuelled the rise of protectionism - the worst possible response, which slows economic progress in both regions. The best solution for the longer term in the North is more investment in education, to raise the supply of skilled labour. However, the benefits of this investment will emerge slowly. During the next one or two decades, Professor Wood argues, other measures are also urgently needed to boost the demand for, and incomes of, unskilled workers.

Nowhere has the divide between advocates and critics of globalization been more striking than in debates over free trade and the environment. And yet the literature on the subject is high on rhetoric and low on results. This book is the first to systematically investigate the subject using both economic theory and empirical analysis. Brian Copeland and Scott Taylor establish a powerful theoretical framework for examining the impact of international trade on local pollution levels, and use it to offer a uniquely integrated treatment of the links between economic growth, liberalized trade, and the environment. The results will surprise many. The authors set out the two leading theories linking international trade to environmental outcomes, develop the empirical implications, and examine their validity using data on measured sulfur dioxide concentrations from over 100 cities worldwide during the period from 1971 to 1986. The empirical results are provocative. For an average country in the sample, free trade is good for the environment. There is little evidence that developing countries will specialize in pollution-intensive products with further trade. In fact, the results suggest just the opposite: free trade will shift pollution-intensive goods production from poor countries with lax regulation to rich countries with tight regulation, thereby lowering world pollution. The results also suggest that pollution declines amid economic growth fueled by economy-wide technological progress but rises when growth is fueled by capital accumulation alone. Lucidly argued and authoritatively written, this book will provide students and researchers of international trade and environmental economics a more reliable way of thinking about this contentious issue, and the methodological tools with which to do so.

International trade accounts for only a small share of growing income inequality and labor-market displacement in the United States. Lawrence deconstructs the gap in real blue-collar wages and labor productivity growth between 1981 and 2006 and estimates how much higher these wages might have been had income growth been distributed proportionately and how much of the gap is due to measurement and technical factors about which little can be done. While increased trade with developing countries may have played some part in causing greater inequality in the 1980s, surprisingly, over the past decade the impact of such trade on inequality has been relatively small. Many imports are no longer produced in the United States, and US goods and services that do compete with imports are not particularly intensive in unskilled labor. Rising income inequality and slow real wage growth since 2000 reflect strong profit growth, much of which may be cyclical, and dramatic income gains for the top 1 percent of wage earners, a development that is more closely related to asset-market performance and technological and institutional innovations rather than conventional trade in goods and services. The minor role of trade, therefore, suggests that any policy that focuses narrowly on trade to deal with wage inequality and job loss is likely to be ineffective. Instead, policymakers should (a) use the tax system to improve income distribution and (b) implement adjustment policies to deal more generally with worker and community dislocation.

The paper presents a dynamic general-equilibrium model of interindustry North-South trade that is used to analyze the effects of trade liberalization on the Northern wage distribution. Both countries have a low-tech sector where consumer goods of constant quality are produced by use of unskilled labor. The North also has a high-tech sector that employs skilled labor and features a quality-ladder model structure with endogenous growth. Both innovation and skill acquisition rates are endogenously determined. In a balanced trade equilibrium, it is found that Southern-originated (Northern-originated) trade liberalization leads to an increase (decrease) in Northern wage inequality both between skilled and unskilled workers and within the group of skilled workers. The endogenous change in the Southern terms of trade determines the direction of change in unskilled wages in both the North and the South.

This book deals with the impact that international trade is likely to have on the skilled-unskilled wage gap in a typical developing economy. This is the first theoretical monograph on this particular issue which has already generated substantial debate and voluminous work for the developed countries. A unique feature of this work is that it tries to explain the possibility of rising inequality across trading nations and looks at the segmented labour markets of the poor economies. It makes convincing arguments that the standard general equilibrium models, the main workhorse of trade theory, can be given a creative facelift to address a number of critical and emerging issues in the area of trade and development.