I explore the interpretation of global and regional economic integration as issues of equality of access for producers in di¤erent locations to any particular market. An industry in an individual country can be seen as becoming more globalised as producers worldwide gain more equal access to...

I outline the potential implications of sectoral factor immobility for the debate on the effects of low-wage competition on wage inequality in advanced countries. In theory, the presence of sector-specific factors serves to damp the magnification effect of World traded prices upon relative...

A major current issue in the economics of trade blocs is where the bloc is not just a customs union, but also incorporates substantial regulatory harmonisation or mutual recognition elements. The derivation of the costs of non-membership of such a bloc is not straightforward. In this paper I...

Post-Soviet restructuring has produced mixed economic results. In general, the more advanced countries, which have now joined the European Union, have fared better, while those further East in the CIS have seen a combination of rapid falls in measured gross domestic product and wages, followed...

To explore the mixed economic results and huge distributional changes experienced by post-Soviet economies, I set up a series of theoretical and numerical simulation models using an approach based upon heterogeneous firms, where 'reform' means closure of inefficient capacity. In the presence of...

Mankiw, Romer and Weil's (1992) finding of a cross-country relationship between savings rates, school enrolment and income levels is highly ambiguous. Their in- terpretation that it is consistent with an augmented Solow model depends on the implausible assumption that educational productivity is...

Abstract Using a new set of measures of concentration of trade, I suggest that the opening up of trade to date has been greatly exaggerated. At least judging on the basis of trade concentration, agriculture and service sectors should barely be seen as globalized at all. Contrary to other, recent...

We investigate the theoretical relationship between wage concentration and international market integration. Access to imported varieties lowers the cost of intermediate inputs ("machines") used to carry out production tasks, causing workers with different comparative abilities to be sorted...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

This paper focuses on the decomposition of observed increases in UK wage inequality since 1979 into the component factors of competition from low-wage imports and technological change. Building on recent work by Abrego and Whalley, it argues that the length of production run and degree of .xity...