Task trade and the employment pattern: the offshoring and onshoring of Brazilian firms

This paper studies the effect of an expansion of imported intermediate inputs on establishments’ average task intensities and employment size in a middle-income country. I use confidential matched employer-employee data and information on trade transactions for the universe of Brazilian firms. Propensity Score Matching indicates that import expansion leads to an overall employment growth, higher intensities in routine and non-routine manual tasks and an increased share of intermediates exports. Thus our findings point out that intermediates imports represent onshored instead of offshored tasks. This result remains unchanged regardless of whether imports from high- or low-wage countries are considered.