The Global Labor Market Impact of Emerging Giants: A Quantitative Assessment

Abstract

This paper investigates both aggregate and distributional impacts of the trade integration of China, India, and Central and Eastern Europe in a quantitative multicountry multisector model, comparing outcomes with and without factor market frictions. Under perfect within-country factor mobility, the gains to the rest of the world from trade integration of emerging giants are 0.37 percent, ranging from −0.37 percent for Honduras to 2.28 percent for Sri Lanka. Reallocation of factors across sectors contributes relatively little to the aggregate gains, but has large distributional effects. The aggregate gains to the rest of the world are only 0.065 percentage points lower when neither capital nor labor can move across sectors within a country. On the other hand, the distributional effects of the emerging giants’ trade integration are an order of magnitude larger, with changes in real factor returns ranging from −5 percent to 5 percent across sectors in most countries. The workers and capital owners in emerging giants’ comparative advantage sectors such as Textiles and Wearing Apparel experience greatest losses, whereas factor owners in Printing and Medical, Precision and Optical Instruments normally gain the most.