Trade Protection and Wages: Evidence from the Colombian Trade Reforms
Опубликовано на портале: 24-12-2003
NBER Working Paper Series.
2001.
w8575.
Организация:
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)Тематический раздел:
Starting in 1985, Colombia experienced gradual trade liberalization that culminated
in the drastic tariff reductions of 1990-91. This paper exploits these trade reforms
to investigate the relationship between protection and wages. The focus of the analysis
is on relative wages, defined as industry wage premiums relative to the economy-wide
average wage. Using the June waves of the Colombian National Household Survey, we
first compute wage premiums for the period 1984-98, adjusting for a series of worker
characteristics, job and firm attributes, and informality. We find that industry
wage premiums in Colombia exhibit remarkably less persistence over time than U.S.
wage premiums. Similarly, measures of trade protection are less correlated over time
than in the U.S. data, indicating that as a result of trade liberalization the structure
of protection has changed. Regressions of wage premiums on tariffs, without industry
fixed effects, produce a negative relationship between protection and wages; workers
in protected sectors earn less than workers with similar observable characteristics
in unprotected sectors. With fixed effects the results are reversed: Trade protection
is found to increase relative wages. The effect is economically significant: Elimination
of tariffs in an industry with an average level of protection in 1984 would lead
to a 4% wage decline in this industry. For the most protected industries the effect
increases to 7.3%. We also find that - in contrast to the U.S. - sectors with high
import penetration in Colombia pay higher wages; nevertheless, regressions with industry
fixed effects indicate that an increase of imports in a particular sector is associated
with lower wages. The differences between the results with and without fixed effects
are indicative of the importance of (time-invariant) political economy factors as
determinants of protection. Further issues concerning the effects of trade liberalization,
such as the relevance of time-variant political economy factors, the importance of
employment guarantees, liberalization induced productivity changes, and the interplay
of trade and labor reforms, will be investigated in a sequel paper.
Ключевые слова
внешнеторговое регулирование либерализация международной торговли международная торговля цена факторов производства
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