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Cheap Imports and the Loss of US Manufacturing Jobs
Author(s) -
Kemeny Thomas,
Rigby David,
Cooke Abigail
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the world economy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.594
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1467-9701
pISSN - 0378-5920
DOI - 10.1111/twec.12238
Subject(s) - offshoring , competition (biology) , economics , job loss , wage , china , labour economics , manufacturing , census , work (physics) , manufacturing sector , international trade , outsourcing , business , mechanical engineering , ecology , population , demography , engineering , marketing , sociology , political science , law , unemployment , biology , economic growth
This study examines the role of international trade and specifically imports from low‐wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor‐proportions‐inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry‐level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longitudinal Employer‐Household Dynamics data set, detailed establishment information from the Census of Manufactures and transaction‐level trade data, we find that rising import competition from China and other developing economies increases the likelihood of job loss among manufacturing workers with less than a high school degree; it is not significantly related to job losses for workers with at least a college degree.