Trade and labor markets are intimately connected. This connection presents governments with a dual economic challenge that cannot be resolved without social compromise: maximizing aggregate gains but minimizing disaggregated costs, which can include losses to individuals and groups. This paper...

This paper studies the relationship between global value chain (GVC) participation, worker-level routine task intensity, and wage inequality within countries. Using unique survey data from 38 countries, we find that higher GVC participation is associated with more routine-intensive work,...

Services from information technology to research to finance are now as subject to international trade as goods have been for decades. What are the labor market consequences of the recent surge in services offshoring? While offshoring has traditionally been found to affect only less-skilled...

The extent to which developing countries benefit from foreign direct investment (FDI) depends on whether they are able to realize the productivity-enhancing benefits of knowledge and technology spillovers from foreign investors. To date, the experiences in Sub-Saharan Africa have been largely...

Using newly collected survey data on direct supplier-multinational linkages in Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Vietnam, this paper first evaluates whether foreign investors differ from domestic producers in terms of their potential to generate positive spillovers for...

Using a cross-section of more than 25,000 domestic manufacturing firms in 78 low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses how mediating factors influence intra-industry productivity spillovers to domestic firms from foreign direct investment. It...

This paper considers the effects of globalization on economic insecurity. It argues that the heightened economic insecurity calls not only for greater oversight of finance, but a rebuilding of domestic labor market protections.

Analysis of 35 U.S. manufacturing and service industries over the period 1998-2006 supports aggregate and firm-level studies showing that off-shoring is associated with a higher share of corporate profit in total value added. But these “dynamic” gains from off-shoring have not been realized,...

This paper shows that a “new wave of globalization,” involving extensive offshoring, has raised both actual and perceived labor market insecurity in industrialized countries. The paper analyzes various channels through which this new wave of globalization leads to economic insecurity. It...

Imports are linked to higher cost mark-ups and firm profits, and the gains from such non-competitive imports--the result of offshoring--are increasingly associated with the reinvestment of these higher profits. Our regression analysis of 35 US manufacturing and service industries over the period...