Off and Running? Technology, Trade and the Rising Demand for Skilled Workers in Latin America
The authors describe the evolution of relative wages in five Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They use repeated cross-sections of household surveys, and decompose the evolution of relative wages into factors...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2003/04/2280437/off-running-technology-trade-rising-demand-skilled-workers-latin-america http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18256 |
| Summary: | The authors describe the evolution of
relative wages in five Latin American countries-Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They use repeated
cross-sections of household surveys, and decompose the
evolution of relative wages into factors associated with
changes in relative supply and relative demand. The authors
have three main conclusions: 1) Increases in the relative
wages of the most skilled (university-educated) workers took
place concurrently with increases in their relative
abundance in all of the countries except Brazil. This is
strong evidence of increases in the demand for skilled
workers. 2) Increases in the wage bill of skilled workers
occurred largely within sectors, and in the same sectors in
different countries, which is consistent with skill-biased
technological change. 3) Trade appears to be an important
transmission mechanism. Increases in the demand for the most
skilled workers took place at a time when countries in Latin
America considerably increased the penetration of imports,
including imports of capital goods. The authors show that
changes in the volume and research and development intensity
of imports are significantly related to changes in the
demand for more skilled workers in Latin America. Their
research complements earlier work on the effects of
technology transmitted through trade on productivity and on
the demand for skilled labor. |
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