International trade, real wages, and technical progress: The specific-factors model

Abstract

It has been over fifty years since Stolper and Samuelson (1941) pointed out that whereas free trade may be beneficial to a country in aggregate terms, even a broad-based factor such as labor may be hurt by the price changes which trade brings about. In particular, a staple of Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory is that relatively capital-abundant countries tend to import commodities which are produced by labor-intensive techniques at home, and the competition which such trade engenders serves to depress real wages. Recent battles to obtain passage of the NAFTA accord and Uruguay Round of GATT agreements in the United States have focused on the overall gains which freer trade is likely to produce, and have suggested, perhaps only implicitly, that the gains are sufficient to compensate potential losers among the working class. Such compensation schemes, however, are rarely introduced, although certain sections of the economy may achieve exceptions to a move to more liberal trade.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.