Technological Superiority and the Losses from Migration /

Two facts motivate this study. (1) The United States is the world's most productive economy. (2) The US is the destination for a broad range of net factor inflows: unskilled labor, skilled labor, and capital. Indeed, these two facts may be strongly related: All factors seek to enter the US beca...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
1. Verfasser:
Davis, Donald R.
Körperschaft:
National Bureau of Economic Research
Weitere Verfasser:
Weinstein, David E.
Format:
Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:
Englisch
Veröffentlicht:
Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2002.
Zusammenfassung:
Two facts motivate this study. (1) The United States is the world's most productive economy. (2) The US is the destination for a broad range of net factor inflows: unskilled labor, skilled labor, and capital. Indeed, these two facts may be strongly related: All factors seek to enter the US because of the US technological superiority. The literature on international factor flows rarely links these two phenomena, instead considering one-at-a-time analyses that stress issues of relative factor abundance. This is unfortunate, since the welfare calculations differ markedly. In a simple Ricardian framework, a country that experiences immigration of factors motivated by technological differences always loses from this migration relative to a free trade baseline, while the other country gains. We provide simple calculations suggesting that the magnitude of the losses for US natives may be quite large $72 billion dollars per year or 0.8 percent of GDP.
Umfang:
1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
Anmerkungen:
May 2002.
Schlagworte: