Opening the Pandora’s Box – Liberalised Input Trade and Wage Inequality with Non-traded Goods and Segmented Unskilled Labour Markets

Abstract

This paper, using a full-employment general equilibrium model for a developing Asian country like India with internationally non-traded goods and international fragmentation in skill-intensive production, illuminates how liberalised input trade, by enhancing demand for skills in the skill-intensive service sectors, could affect the unskilled wages prevailing in the informal sectors and employment conditions in those sectors, through the existence of finished non-tradable and the corresponding domestic demand-supply forces. The model economy is characterised by dual unskilled labour market with unionised formal and nonunionised informal sectors. Quantitative analyses have also been performed to simulate how the changes in elasticities of factor substitution in production of different sectors account for the movement in informal wage and therefore the movement in skilled–unskilled wage gap. Therefore, the relative wage inequality in a developing Asian country like India with dual labour markets has not been governed only by the increase in the skilled wages.