Is Employment Globalizing?
Chen, Liming; Felipe, Jesus; Kam, Andrew J.Y.; Mehta, Aashish | September 2018
Abstract
We investigate the claim that national labor markets have become more globally interconnected in recent decades. We do so by deriving estimates over time of three different notions of interconnection: (i) the share of labor demand that is export induced (i.e., all labor demand created by foreign entities buying products exported by the home country)—we provide estimates for 40 countries; (ii) the share of workers employed in sectors producing tradable goods or services—68 countries; and (iii) the ratio of the number of jobs that are either located in a tradable sector, or that are involved in producing services that are required by these tradable sectors, to all jobs in the economy, which we call the trade-linked employment share—40 countries. Our estimates lead to the conclusion that the evidence of a large increase in the interconnections between national labor markets is far weaker than commonly asserted: levels of interconnectivity, and the direction of changes over time, vary across notions of interconnection and countries. The main reasons for this are labor displacing productivity growth in tradable sectors of each economy and the diminishing fraction of national labor forces hired into manufacturing jobs worldwide. We also discuss the implications of our results for different policy debates that each of the three measures is associated with: international coordination of macroeconomic policies (export-induced labor demand), currency devaluations (share of workers producing tradables), and education and labor protection (trade-linked share).
Citation
Chen, Liming; Felipe, Jesus; Kam, Andrew J.Y.; Mehta, Aashish. 2018. Is Employment Globalizing?. © Asian Development Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/11540/8733. License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.ISSN
2313-6537 (print)
2313-6545 (electronic)
Keywords
Development
Trade
Development Goals
Skills Development
Sustainable Development
Trade Flows
Trade And Development
Food Security And Trade
Trade Volume
Trade Potential
Trade Flows
External Trade
Industrial policy
New technology
Innovations
Industry
Export policy
Import policy
Trade Unions
Development assistance
ADB
Curriculum development
Development assistance
Development aid
Development indicators
Development potential
Development models
Project appraisal
Performance appraisal
Regional development bank
Trade development
Import volume
Export volume
Capital
Business
Communication in rural development
Social participation
Occupational training
Partnership
Joint venture
System analysis
Labor and globalization
Labor policy
Regional trading blocs
Foreign trade and employment
Developing countries
Industrial priorities
Technological innovation
Technology transfer
Foreign trade regulation
Industrial relations
Trade-unions
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