Trade Adjustment Costs in Developing Countries: - World Bank ...

8Adjustment to Trade Policy inDeveloping CountriesGORDON H HANSON1. INTRODUCTIONHow do developing countries adjust to changes in trade policy? Until the lastdecade, most trade economists would probably have used the Heckscher–Ohlin(HO) model, or some variant of it, to answer the question.1 The thinking was thattrade by developing countries was largely based on their comparative advantagein industries that were intensive in the use of unskilled labor, agricultural land,or supplies of natural resources. Models of intra-industry trade were viewed asbest suited for analyzing trade among developed countries. Developments in bothempirical and theoretical research suggest that factor proportions alone are insufficientto understand how a developing economy will respond to trade liberalizationat home or abroad.On the empirical side, the Stolper–Samuelson Theorem, which uses HO logic topredict how changes in goods prices will affect factor prices, has not found muchempirical support (Goldberg and Pavcnik, 2007). Applying a simple HO modelimplies that trade liberalization will tend to reduce income inequality in developingcountries, as factors move into labor-intensive industries, causing the relativedemand for and income of capital or skilled labor to decline. In fact, tradeliberalization is often accompanied by an increase in the relative demand for skilland a rise in wage inequality (Feenstra and Hanson, 2003). Another important developmentin the literature is recognition of significant differences between exportingand non-exporting firms, as well as between multinational and domesticenterprises. Relative to firms that sell solely on the domestic market, exporterstend to be larger, more skill-intensive, more capital-intensive, and more productive,and to pay higher wages (Bernard et al. 2007), a finding that holds in bothdeveloped and developing economies (Tybout, 2003). Multinational firms arelarger and more productive, still. When trade barriers fall, exporters expand at theexpense of smaller, less skill- and capital-intensive domestic establishments. TheHO model is silent about why firms differ, ascribing them little role in adjustment.1 See, for instance, Hanson’s (2004) discussion of literature on the analysis of trade reform in Mexico.