The Impact Of The Changing Trade Structure On The Relative Employment And Wage In China

With the fast development of China's international trade, the trade structure has changed from primary-goods to industry-goods in export. Processing trade is the main mode for China in her trade. Thus, the scale of intermediate inputs trade becomes considerably large. Meanwhile, since 1980s, the wage and employment gap between more-skilled workers and less-skilled workers in the manufacturing of developed countries have widened greatly due to the intermediate inputs trade deduced by the "outsourcing".The present paper seeks to study how the trade structure works on the relative employment and wage in China from the view of the intermediate inputs. The main ideas and contributions are as followers:Firstly, according to the research of the past literature, the author believes that the study on the relationship between trade and employment (wage) of China, should base on the features of its processing trade and the structure of intermediate input. Thus, at the beginning of the paper, the author distinguishes the view of trade structure from that of outsourcing, establishing the new perspective for researching trade-gain issue.Secondly, this paper takes the BEC and STIC standards to define the intermediate inputs separately, and compares the differences between these two outcomes. Then, according to the constituent causes, the author designs the proper index to restore the data to the provincial level, finding that the intermediate inputs trade occupies a large part of her total goods trade with three main features: large ratio of the import to the total import, large scale of the import to that of the export, and decreased ratio of the import to the total import.Finally, since there is no available index to reflect the situation of relative employment or wage of the more-skilled workers, the author creates one. Furthermore, the author is engaged in the regression analysis and the inspection of Feenstra's model.The paper ends with a conclude: the intermediate inputs import would increase the more-skilled workers' relative wages, while the export via versa; whatever the import or the export,the intermediate trade would decrease the more-skilled workers' relative employment level.