Trade With Emerging Countries and the Labour Market: The French Case

Abstract

This chapter examines the effects of international trade on the French labour market. Between 1977 and 1993, trade with countries with GDP per capita less than that of France resulted in job losses of around 350,000, mostly low-skilled workers. However, this loss was mainly due to changes in trade balance rather than the factor content of trade. Trade affected the productive efficiency of industries and the average skill of their labour demand. These effects were not specific to trade with developing countries.

Globalisation and the Rise in Labour Market Inequalities

“…In the US, the correlation in the 1980s is in fact weakly positive (Sachs and Shatz, 1994;Lawrence, 1998). Cortes et al (1998) ®nd a somewhat stronger positive correlation in France in 1977-93. However, Neven and Wyplosz (1998) ®nd negative correlations in both France and Germany in 1976-90, while Haskel and Slaughter (1998) ®nd that, in both the US and the UK, the correlation was positive in the 1980s but negative in the 1970s (which is consistent with the insigni®cant association found for the US over the whole period 1971-91 by Pryor, 1997).…”

Impacts of Trade Liberalization on Employment in Vietnam: A System Generalized Method of Moments Estimation

“…Using this method, Wood (1994) argues that import competition from unskilled labor–abundant countries negatively affects low‐skilled labor in developed countries. Generally, however, empirical evidence of this approach shows a modest impact of trade on employment (Krugman 1995; Cortès, Jean, and Pisani‐Ferry 1996; Sakurai 2004). In the case of France, Messerlin (1995) concludes that the modest and mostly positive employment effects of foreign trade between 1980 and 1992 depended upon macroeconomic factors and policies, as well as upon the structure of labor and product markets.…”

Regional integration and the labour market: The Brazilian case

“…Analysis of the effects of the exchange rate on the labour market (see Klein, Schuh and Triest, 2002) is also outside the scope of this article. 9 Gregory, Zissimos and Greenhalgh (2001) and Cortes, Jean and Pisani-Ferry (1996) make similar analyses for the United Kingdom and France, respectively. Behar (1988) applies the method to the Mexican economy in order to analyse the impact of multilateral trade liberalization on the labour market of that country.…”

“…According to Borjas, Freeman andKatz (1992 and, this aspect can make the use of this methodology questionable, as shown below. Lastly, as noted by Cortes, Jean and Pisani-Ferry (1996), this methodology assumes that the labour market operates in conditions of perfect competition and that adjustment to outside competition will be effected entirely through the amount. This latter criticism is open to question, however: the calculation of factor content shows what the equivalent amount would be in terms of trade flows, but obviously the actual effect of this variation on employment depends on the conditions prevailing in the labour market (i.e., how much of the adjustment will take place through prices and how much through the amount).…”

“…As we will see below, Borjas, Freeman andKatz (1992 and propose the use of a coefficient which reflects the technological gap of the developing countries. According to Cortes, Jean and Pisani-Ferry (1996), this problem reflects an aggregation bias: the indicators are calculated by industry, according to the classification of the inputoutput matrices, but international competition takes place at the product level. 4 This not only leads to a skew in the estimation of the number of jobs lost, but also takes no account of the movements of labour which may take place within a sector.…”