Abstract
Economists and other social scientists are calling for a reassessment of the impact of international trade on labor markets in developed and developing countries. Classical models of globalization and trade, based upon the international exchange of finished goods, fail to capture the fragmentation of much commodity production and the geographical separation of individual production tasks. This fragmentation, captured in the growing volume of intra-industry trade, prompts investigation of the effects of trade within, rather than between, sectors of the economy. In this paper we examine the relationship between international trade and the task structure of US employment. We link disaggregate US trade data from 1972 to 2006, the NBER manufacturing database, the Decennial Census, and occupational and task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Within-industry shifts in task characteristics are linked to import competition and technological change. Our results suggest that trade has played a major role in the growth in relative demand for nonroutine tasks, particularly those requiring high levels of interpersonal interaction.
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Notes
Authors’ calculations from US import data available from the Center for International Data at UC Davis.
Trade in services is an area of growing importance. US service imports have nearly tripled since 1992, and they accounted for 15% of total imports in 2005 (Bureau of Economic Affairs 2010). Though their exclusion may affect overall results, data on service trade remain far too aggregate at this time for the kind of analytical approach pursued here.
Fulltime work is defined as at least 35 hours each week on average. We define full year employment to mean at least 48 weeks each year.
In 1998, the DOT was replaced by the Occupational Information Network, or O*Net. O*Net represents not simply an update but a change in general approach, responding to criticisms ranging from excessive focus on tasks, measurement problems, and inadequate focus on nonmanufacturing industries. For the purpose of this particular project however, task emphasis and a manufacturing focus are less problematic. Moreover, O*Net is not appropriate to the kind of time series analysis performed in this investigation. For a fuller discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of DOT, see Cain and Treiman (1981) and Peterson et al. (2001).
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this project was provided by the Center for International Business Education and Research, UCLA Anderson School of Management and by the National Science Foundation under grant number 0961735. We thank Sebastien Breau, Michael Manville, Michael Storper, participants at the 2009 North American Regional Science Council conference, and an anonymous referee for comments that significantly improved the quality of this paper.
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Kemeny, T., Rigby, D. Trading away what kind of jobs? Globalization, trade and tasks in the US economy. Rev World Econ 148, 1–16 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10290-011-0099-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10290-011-0099-5