TY  - JOUR
AU  - Strauss-Kahn, Vanessa
TI  - The Role of Globalization in the Within-Industry Shift Away from Unskilled Workers in France
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9716
PY  - 2003
Y2  - May 2003
DO  - 10.3386/w9716
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9716
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9716.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Vanessa Strauss-Kahn
M1  - published as Vanessa Strauss-Kahn. "The Role of Globalization in the Within-Industry Shift Away from Unskilled Workers in France," in Robert E. Baldwin and L. Alan Winters, editors, "Challenges to Globalization: Analyzing the Economics" University of Chicago Press (2004)

AB  - Growth in international trade and globalization has been correlated in nearly all countries with a worsening of the less skilled labor situation relative to the skilled. In this empirical paper, I show that an important component of recent globalization in France has been a huge growth in vertical specialization -- the completion of the different production stages of a good in different countries. By shifting relative labor demand across countries, globalization of this form could explain the poor relative showing of unskilled labor in industrial countries. Using input-output tables and labor data, I find that in France vertical specialization -- defined as the share of imported inputs in production -- rose from 9% in 1977 to 14% in 1993. Further estimations show that vertical specialization contributed from 11% to 15% of the decline in the share of unskilled workers in French manufacturing employment for the 1977-1985 period and for 25% of the decline in the 1985-1993 period.
ER  -