نهادهای بازار کار، تحرک سرمایه بین المللی و تداوم توسعه نیافتگی

We show that the impact of globalization on growth and wages crucially depends on the labor market structures of the countries involved. We contrast bargaining and perfect competition. Under perfect capital markets, convergence of capital and income per capita always occurs despite different labor market structures. However, different labor market structures prevent convergence of the income shares, with unionized countries showing a lower wage rate and consequent capital inflows. Therefore unionization, not globalization, is the cause of discrepancies in the within-country income-distribution patterns. Openness is always preferable to autarky for a small developing economy, independently of its labor market structure.

The current expansion in international trade and capital flows has linked the economic performances of the developed countries to those of the developing countries as never before.1 However, the process of integration has been much faster for capital markets than for labor markets and their institutional structure. Within the ongoing debate on the impact of globalization, its potential connection with the issue of labor markets rigidities has not yet been addressed. The main contribution of this paper is therefore to uncover the implications of differential labor market structures for an integrated world.

The main contribution of this paper is to incorporate differential labor market structures within a dynamic, general-equilibrium, open-economy model with microfoundations. The resulting model allows to analyze the interaction between globalization and market rigidities, two crucial issues which are commonly addressed as separate. Our results can be summarized as follows. When we analyze the interaction between a small open economy and a large one, under different combinations of labor market structures, we find that between-country convergence to the same level of per-capita capital, output and total income always obtains, despite differences in the labor market structure, when capital markets are fully developed. However, we also show that convergence to the same distribution of income across factors of production is precluded whenever labor markets are subject to different mechanisms of wage determination.