In the trade-technology-wage debate, the effects of the various forms of technical progress on relative factor prices have been addressed in a number of contributions over the past decade. However, the existing literature is far from conclusive. The various contributions either relied on specific assumptions, such as Leontief technologies or Cobb-Douglas demand, that were decisive for the respective conclusions, or they used a more general framework, arriving at ambiguous results in many cases. In this paper we analyse a general equilibrium framework with CES production and CES demand functions, which allows for any discrete number of sectors and countries integrated via trade flows. Technologies are country- and sector-specific and endowment structures differ across countries. The necessary and sufficient conditions under which the relative wage rates are rising or falling in the domestic and foreign economies are derived. This is done for various types of factor- and sector-biased technical change taking place in a particular sector in either the home or foreign country. The conditions ¿ depending on the relative skill intensity of the innovating sector, the elasticities of substitution in demand and supply, the relative factor endowment and the prevailing (equilibrium) relative wage rate ¿ allow for straightforward economic interpretations. This permits to solve the cases classified as ambiguous in the existing literature and provides clear-cut conditions which are important for modelling and empirical research. Furthermore, the results are interpreted with respect to recent empirical studies where special emphasis is given to the sector-biased versus factor-biased hypotheses.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, wiiw in its series Working Papers with number
35.
Length: 24 pages including 2 Tables and 3 Figures Date of creation: Dec 2005 Date of revision: Publication status: Published as wiiw Working Paper, September 2005 Handle: RePEc:wii:wpaper:35
Find related papers by JEL classification: C62 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods and Programming - - - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium C68 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods and Programming - - - Computable General Equilibrium Models F16 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade and Labor Market Interactions O33 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Technological Change - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
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