In the context of the marriage between international trade and employment, theanalysis recently published by the OECD examines the vast literature on the subject of creation & of jobs and wages in relation to economic growth, productivity and income distributionas well as the working conditions themselves. The document also examines concerns about the effects of offshoring and trade in services, as well as the related compliance costs. On balance, in almost all of these dimensions international trade plays a role important in job creation, raising wages in both advanced and least developed countries, overall improving working conditions. However, the benefits of trade do not accrue automatically and, in this sense, completion policies trade opening are needed to have full and lasting positive effects on growth and jobs. Furthermore, the process of trade growth necessarily involves the continuous redistribution of resources from less productive to more productive activities: This may mean that, even as average wages and working conditions improve, some groups of workers may face periods of unemployment as well as a reduction in their real wages when switching from one occupational sector to another. For these reasons, structural reform policies in a context of macroeconomic stability and a favorable investment climate on the one hand, and, on the other hand, protection of workers, safeguarding working conditions and facilitating transitions from one occupation to another play a complementary role in realizing the potential wage, employment and income gains related to trade.
The paper explores the potential for increased trade in services to improve global economic growth prospects on information from labor force surveys in Chile, France, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the input- OECD output. It documents that many assets in the business services sector are tradable across international borders. Marketable business services account for a larger share of manufacturing employment in some high-income countries. In all markets analyzed, business services mainly employ skilled workers earning significantly higher average wages in manufacturing or non-tradable services. High-income countries are relatively abundant in skilled workers and, therefore, have a comparative advantage for this sector.
Business services are essential for the competitiveness of high- and medium-tech manufacturing: access to such services through imports would help middle-income countries strengthen their comparative advantage in these manufacturing industries and thereby shift the value chain.
The document also highlights the possible structural changes that have followed the liberalization of trade. Tasks that can be digitized and delocalized are often complementary to tasks that cannot be. Therefore, the evaluation of Offshoring a job requires that you take into consideration all the tasks you are performing. The penetration of imports into the services sector has a small, but positive, effect on the share of related activities to obtain and process information being performed for the local economy. In other words, offshore complements rather than replaces local information processing. There are two types of spillover effects that are particularly relevant from the point of view of trade support policies: spillover effects on the domestic market and direct effects of spillovers, ie the impact of migration and related employment costs. Hence the political implication of these effects is that un host government can influence the number of migrant workers not only by acting directly on migration policies, but also indirectly, by providing incentives for their companies that decide to relocate abroad.
