This paper assesses the current state of evidence on how international trade shapes inequality and poverty through its influence on earnings and employment opportunities. While the focus is mainly on developing countries, in part because we have more evidence in that context, the discussion...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of trade liberalization on plant productivity in the case of Chile. Chile presents an interesting setting to study this relationship since it underwent a massive trade liberalization that significantly exposed its plants to competition from abroad...

We review the empirical evidence on the relationship between Trade Liberalization, Inequality, and Poverty based on the analysis of micro data from several developing countries that underwent significant trade reforms in recent years. Despite many measurement and identification difficulties, and...

This paper considers the impact of liberalized trade policy on child labor in a developing country. While trade liberalization entails an increase in the relative price of the exported product, trade theory provides ambiguous predictions on how this price change affects the incidence of child...

Starting in 1985, Colombia experienced gradual trade liberalization that culminated in the drastic tariff reductions of 1990-91. This paper exploits these trade reforms to investigate the relationship between protection and wages. The focus of the analysis is on relative wages, defined as...

We explore the relationship between greater exposure to trade (as measured by openness) and child labor in a cross country setting. Our methodology accounts for the fact that trade flows are endogenous to child labor (and labor standards more generally) by examining the relationship between...

We examine whether the Colombian trade reform can explain any of Colombia's decline in urban poverty between 1984 and 1995. Our approach focuses on short- and medium- run channels through which trade reform could affect poverty. Despite the chronological coincidence of the poverty reduction with...

This paper examines how prices, markups and marginal costs respond to trade liberalization. We develop a framework to estimate markups from production data with multi-product firms. This approach does not require assumptions on the market structure or demand curves faced by firms, nor...

We examine the role of structural change in the economic development of Vietnam from 1990 to 2008. Structural change accounted for a third of the growth in aggregate labor productivity during this period, which averaged 5.1 percent per annum. We discuss the role of reforms in agriculture,...

We study the effects of a positive export shock on labor allocation between the informal, microenterprise sector and the formal firm sector in a low-income country. The U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement led to large reductions in U.S. tariffs on Vietnamese exports. We find that the share of...