Trading Away What Kind of Jobs? Globalization, Trade and Tasks in the U.S. Economy

PWP-CCPR-2010-007

Abstract

Economists and geographers are calling for a reassessment of the impact of international trade on labor markets in developed and developing countries. There is growing recognition that classical models of globalization and trade, based upon the international exchange of nished goods, fail to capture the fragmentation of much commodity production and the geographical separation of individual production tasks. The growing volume of intra-industry trade signals a remapping of the spatial division of labor that challenges existing industry-based accounts and calls for investigation of the impacts of trade within, rather than between, sectors of the economy. In this paper we investigate the extent to which international trade stimulates within-industry changes in the task structure of U.S. employment. We link highly detailed U.S. trade data from 1972 to 2006, to the NBER manufacturing database, to the Decennial Census, and to occupational and task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. After accounting for the eect of technological change, we nd that trade stimulates greater relative
demand for nonroutine tasks, particularly those requiring high levels of interper-
sonal interaction. Unlike most previous studies, we nd that the impact of trade
on the nature of work is substantially larger than the impact of new technology.