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Trade with Low-income Countries and the Relative Wages and Employment Opportunities of the Unskilled: An Exploratory Analysis for West Germany and the UK

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Global Trade and European Workers

Abstract

Since the early 1970s, European imports of manufactures from developing countries, especially from East and South-East Asia, have grown rapidly. The production of many of these imports requires relatively large amounts of unskilled labour. At the same time, the wage rate for unskilled labour has declined relative to skilled labour in some European countries while elsewhere in Europe unemployment among the unskilled has increased substantially.1 Several recent studies, including in particular Wood (1994), have argued that these trends are linked and that it was growing imports from Asia and other lower-income countries that made the unskilled in many industrialised countries worse off.

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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Lücke, M. (1999). Trade with Low-income Countries and the Relative Wages and Employment Opportunities of the Unskilled: An Exploratory Analysis for West Germany and the UK. In: Brenton, P., Pelkmans, J. (eds) Global Trade and European Workers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27035-4_4

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