دستمزدهای واقعی و کالاهای غیرمعامله

This paper examines the connection between a terms-of-trade improvement and the real wage rate for a country that is immersed in a trading world with many traded commodities as well as a non-tradeable. There is an array of commodities that are imported but not produced at home, and the price of one of these commodities is lowered, which would, by itself, raise real wage rates if local wage rates are tied to world prices with sufficient diversity in local production to tie factor prices to world commodity prices. If the improvement is sufficiently great, the home country may cease production of one of its tradeables, and the price of non-tradeables changes to clear its market. Details of how this affects the real wage rate depend upon two attributes: Is the non-tradeable labor-intensive relative to the remaining tradeable, and is the income effect of increasing the demand for non-tradeables overpowered by the substitution effect tending to reduce demand? Furthermore, with large changes new traded commodities enter the production mix, so that factor prices once again are tied to world prices. And a wealthier country with the same technology may find its real wage improving at the same time as the opposite change takes place in the home country.

Three scenarios have been selected in which to raise the question: What is the impact of a favorable movement in a country's terms of trade (brought about by a reduction in the price of an importable not locally produced) on the real wage rate? Not surprisingly, this change could easily be of either sign in a simple Heckscher–Ohlin setting, depending upon the labor-intensity ranking of tradeables and non-tradeables. For small changes, if two tradeables are produced at given world prices, there is no change in the nominal wage rate. The magnification effect found in Heckscher–Ohlin settings implies that if only one tradeable is produced, the change in the nominal wage rate either exceeds both commodity price changes for produced goods (traded and non-traded) or is lower than both. By contrast, in the specific-factors setting with labor the mobile factor, the nominal wage change is a positive weighted average of commodity price changes. Despite the magnified response of the nominal wage change in the Heckscher–Ohlin setting for small changes in relative commodity prices, larger changes may encourage a change in the pattern of production from one commodity to another, with an intermediate range in which two commodities are produced during which there is no change in the nominal wage rate. In such ranges there is nonetheless a continuing fall in the price of importables, which, by lowering the cost of living to labor, serves to encourage an improvement in the real wage rate. That is, even if factor-intensity rankings in production and the nature of demand conditions conspire to lower the nominal wage rate when only a single tradeable good is produced, there are periods in which tradeable production is diversified during which the real wage rate is temporarily improved by the reduction in the consumer price index. Demand conditions have a role to play in addition to that of factor intensities in that the fall in the price of a consumable import commodity may encourage more resources to go into the production of the non-tradeable (if income effects dominate substitution effects in demand) or to move out of non-tradeables otherwise. Comparing two countries that share the same technology and world market prices as well as taste patterns, but with non-tradeables being relatively capital intensive in a low-wage Home country and labor-intensive in a high-wage Foreign country, the real wage gap separating countries would become more pronounced if they face a fall in the price of a non-produced importable and demand conditions are inelastic, and the gap would be narrowed if substitution effects dominate income effects in demand. In specific-factor settings an improvement in the terms of trade is shown to be more apt to lead to improvements in the real wage rate as well, especially if the factor intensity and labor demand elasticities are fairly similar between tradeables and non-tradeables. This optimistic forecast for a real wage improvement is even more likely in a Middle-Products scenario, which is based on the specific-factor setting.