Foreign capital, public infrastructure, and wage inequality in developing countries

Abstract

We establish four-sector general equilibrium models to investigate how an inflow of foreign capital influences the skilled–unskilled wage inequality in the presence of the endogenous public infrastructure provision. In the situation of the pure public infrastructure provision, the change of the skilled–unskilled wage inequality is determined by the comparison of the capital distributive shares in urban sectors. In the case of the semi-public infrastructure provision, the change of the skilled–unskilled wage gap is determined by the factor substitution elasticities in urban sectors. A potential extension is also given and it confirms the robustness of the obtained results.