Paul Krugman Writes About Trade and inequality

Paul Krugman writes about the link between expanding trade--especially between the U.S. and China--and rising income and wealth inequality within the United States. I find myself skeptical. Yes, China is exporting a lot of goods that it produces using low-skill labor. But if those goods were to be produced here in the United States, they would be produced with higher-skil labor and with lots of capital. The key question is how has the shift in economic activity created by expanding trade affected the demand for different kinds of labor and capital here in the United States. We have had:

• A shrinkage in export and import-competing manufacturing.
• A tremendous expansion in construction.
• An expansion in consumer services.

I don't see how those shifts significantly reduce the demand for factor of production "labor" and enhance the demand for factor of production "capital." Construction employs lots of capital--but so does tradeable manufacturing. I want to see Leontief input-output matrices for the U.S. before I upweight trade and downweight education, collapsing unions, migration, changing norms, monetary policy, and other factors as more likely to be responsible for the lion's share of the increase in U.S. inequality over the past generation and a half.

And "outsourcing": outsourcing seems at least as likely to me to equalize the U.S. income distribution as to give it a further inequality boost. Consider what kinds of jobs are likely to be outsourced.

But here's Paul Krugman:

Trade and inequality, revisited | vox (beta) - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from Europe's leading economists: It’s no longer safe to assert that trade’s impact on the income distribution in wealthy countries is fairly minor. There’s a good case that it is big, and getting bigger. I’m not endorsing protectionism, but free-traders need better answers to the anxieties of globalisation’s losers.

During the 1980s and 1990s, there was considerable concern about the possible role of globalisation in contributing to rising income inequality, especially in the United States. This concern was based on standard economic theory: since the 1941 Stolper-Samuelson paper, we’ve known that growing trade can have large effects on income distribution, and can easily leave broad groups, such as less-skilled workers, worse off.

After economists looked hard at the numbers, however, the consensus was that the effect of trade on inequality was probably modest. Recently, Ben Bernanke cited these results – but he recognised a problem: “Unfortunately, much of the available empirical research on the influence of trade on earnings inequality dates from the 1980s and 1990s and thus does not address later developments. Whether studies of the more recent period will reveal effects of trade on the distribution of earnings that differ from those observed earlier is to some degree an open question.”

But the question isn’t really that open. It’s clear that applying the same models to current data that, for example, led William Cline of the Peterson Institute to conclude in 1997 that trade was responsible for a 6% widening in the college-high school gap would lead to a much larger estimate today. Furthermore, some of the considerations that once seemed to set limits on the possible inequality-promoting effects of trade now seem much less constraining.

There are really two key points here: the rise of China, and the growing fragmentation of production. First, thanks to the rise of China, OECD imports of manufactured goods from developing countries have continued to rise rapidly since the early 1990s. Cline’s estimate of income distribution effects was based on data from 1993, when US imports of manufactures from developing countries were approximately 2% of GDP; now that number is close to 5%, and rising rapidly.

At the same time, the rise of China has prevented, for the time being, a development that I and others expected to mitigate the effects of trade on income distribution: up-skilling by the developing country exporters. “As newly industrializing countries grow,” I wrote in 1995, “their comparative advantage may shift away from products of very low skill intensity.” And that’s exactly what happened – for the countries that were the major exporters of manufactured goods to the OECD then. As John Romalis has shown, the exports of the original group of Asian newly-industrialising economies have shifted dramatically away from labour-intensive toward skill-intensive products.

But along has come China, which is far more labour-abundant now than the NIEs were then. A simple indicator is relative wage rates: in 1990, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the original four Asian NIEs had hourly compensation costs that were 25% of the US level. Now the BLS estimates that China’s labour costs are only 3% of US levels.

In 1995 I also believed that the effects of trade on inequality would eventually hit a limit, because at a certain point advanced economies would run out of labour-intensive industries to lose – more formally, that we’d reach a point of complete specialisation, beyond which further growth in trade would have no further effects on wages. What has happened instead is that the limit keeps being pushed out, as trade creates “new” labour-intensive industries through the fragmentation of production.

For example, the manufacture of microprocessors for personal computers is clearly a highly sensitive, skill-intensive process. Intel’s microprocessor production, however, now takes place in two stages: the “fabs,” which print the circuits on disks of silicon, are all located in high-wage advanced countries, but the assembly and testing, in which those disks are cut into individual chips and tested to be sure that they work, is conducted in China, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Outsourcing of services, in both directions, adds to the possibilities of unequalising trade. The skill-intensive pieces of production processes that mainly take place in the third world are often now located in the OECD – for example, Lenovo, the Chinese computer company, has its executive headquarters in North Carolina.

What all this comes down to is that it’s no longer safe to assert, as we could a dozen years ago, that the effects of trade on income distribution in wealthy countries are fairly minor. There’s now a good case that they are quite big, and getting bigger.

This doesn’t mean that I’m endorsing protectionism. It does mean that free-traders need better answers to the anxieties of those who are likely to end up on the losing side from globalisation.

Comments

[Matt]

WHen China and the U.S. increase trade, now to about 5-9% of China's GDP, then each side has to accommodate the investment profile of the other according to the coorelation coefficient. In other words, we have to look like China with about 5% of our economy.

But, China is a two tiered system. Hence we have to look somewhat like a two tiered system to get the most efficient investment profile.

[Demosthenes]

Er, yes, let's consider which jobs get to get outsourced: middle class positions in either manufacturing or (depending on the industry) lower-level white-collar work.

Saying "it's reducing the demand for the factor of production" is somewhat disingenuous. The problem isn't simply labor vs. capital as a whole, but which labor, and which capital. After all, the poor shlubs buying mutual funds from television ads aren't the ones making big money... it's the guys investing the millions of dollars they make from the "labor" of executive management.

And they can do it because their jobs cannot be exported. They're in a superior bargaining position precisely because of this trade, and they're milking it for all it's worth. They aren't the only ones in this position--some kinds of skilled labor are doing very well too--but it has a lot to do with things.

And we can't all be plumbers.

[Too Much Fed]

"collapsing unions, migration, changing norms, monetary policy, and other factors as more likely to be responsible for the lion's share of the increase in U.S. inequality over the past generation and a half."

IMO, most of those are directly or indirectly related to cheap labor.

[Too Much Fed]

"And "outsourcing": outsourcing seems at least as likely to me to equalize the U.S. income distribution as to give it a further inequality boost. Consider what kinds of jobs are likely to be outsourced."

When the 99% (or higher) of economists who got it wrong start having their jobs outsourced, we will FINALLY get somewhere.