Shi Jin

2 weeks ago | tandfonline.com | Jie Li |Shi Jin

AbstractThis paper studies the differential effect of agriculture trade liberalisation on labor costs for high- vs. low-skilled industries in the manufacturing sector. With data from China, we employ a first-difference regression specification and exploit the fact that labour outflows from the agriculture sector are largely unskilled. We show that increases in agriculture imports are associated with declines in labour cost in the low-skilled manufacturing sector.