Jobs and Exposure to International Trade within the Service Sector in Sweden

Abstract

AbstractTo establish in which service industries there is international trade (or it may potentially exist), we calculate locational Ginis for different industries. The basic idea is that from this measure of regional concentration of different activities within a country we can identify industries where there appears to be regional trade, and hence also a potential for international trade. Based on our method, we find that: (i) the number of employed in tradable service appears to be at least as large as in the manufacturing sector, (ii) tradable service is much more skill intensive than manufacturing, and (iii) lately, the employment in tradable service has increased substantially. We argue that the last mentioned result is consistent with the substantial growth of skilled labour in Sweden since the mid‐1990s (Rybczynski effect) and factors leading to increased relative demand for skilled labour. Particularly, increased competition from and offshoring to low‐wage countries seem recently to have had a considerable impact on the creation of skilled jobs and the displacement of less skilled jobs in the tradable sector in Sweden. Furthermore, we apply a similar method as for industries to identify tradable occupations. Using our classification of tradable industries and tradable occupations in a Mincer type wage equation, we find that workers in such industries and occupations receive a wage premia of 12–13 per cent.