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Blue Collar Blues
Is Trade to Blame for Rising US Income Inequality?
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- Book details for Blue Collar Blues
- Policy Analyses in International Economics
- Robert Z. Lawrence (author)
- Paperback, 227 x 157 x 6mm , 144 pp, graphs, charts, index
- 15 Apr 2008
- The Peterson Institute for International Economics
- 0881324140
- 9780881324143
What are the links between slow US real wage growth, increased earnings inequality and trade? Lawrence deconstructs the gap between real blue-collar wages and labor productivity growth over the past quarter-century and estimates how much of the gap is due to measurement issues and how much higher these wages might have been if the distribution of income been kept constant.He also argues that while increased trade with developing countries may have played some part in causing greater wage inequality in the 1980s, surprisingly, over the past decade the impact has been too small to show up in aggregate wage data on inequality. Increases in income inequality and slow real wage growth since 2000 reflect strong profit growth. Increases in inequality over the past decade also have resulted from dramatic income gains for the top one percent of wage earners.
Robert Z. Lawrence, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, is the Albert L. Williams Professor of Trade and Investment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a member of his Council of Economic Advisers in 1999. He held the New Century Chair as a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and founded and edited the Brookings Trade Forum. He has served as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the World Bank, the OECD, and UNCTAD. He is also the author or coauthor of several books, including Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation (2006), and Has Globalization Gone Far Enough? The Costs of Fragmented Markets (2004).
1. Introduction; 2. The Wage-Productivity Gap, 1987-2006; 3. Wage Inequality and Trade; 4. Class Inequality and Trade; 5. Globalization, Stock Options,and the Super Rich; 6. Job Dislocation: Past and Present; 7. Conclusion.
