The Effects Of Foreign Trade On The Relative Wage Gap

Since opening to the world, China's import and export trade volume is increasing year by year, in2009its volume reached2207.535billion dollars, it ranked the third stably in the world. Meanwhile, all sorts of the uneven distribution of income has become more and more obvious, especially the income gap between skilled labor and unskilled labor is widening obviously. Based on the difference between the trade theory conclusion and reality, this paper aims to answer the following questions: whether import and export trade effects on relative wage gap? If it has, it is positive or negative? How to affect? How to develop import and export trade is reasonable?First of all, the paper overview the theories are in existence being related to the relationship between trade and relative wage gap, then on the basis of theoretical analysis concludes6ways in which the trade influence the relative wage gap, focuses on the analysis of the trade on relative wage gap mechanism. This paper selects China's32industries sector as the research subject, uses the latest statistical data from2002to 2009, applies econometric methods in empirical research and concludes that:Firstly, if we take no account of sector characteristics, we will find that import and export trade decrease relative wage gap. Secondly, if we decompose foreign trade into import and export, we will find that increasing export decreases relative wage gap, but increasing import increases relative wage gap; if we take account of sector characteristics, firstly, we will find that export increase the gap, but import has no effects on the relative wage gap, secondly, the differences of factor intensity among sectors lead to the differences of the effect of import and export on relative wage gap, which export decreases resource-intensive, labor-intensive and capital-intensive industry's relative wage gap, increases technology-intensive industry's relative wage gap, import has no significant effect on resource-intensive and capital-intensive industry's relative wage gap, increases the labor-intensive industry and technology-intensive industry's relative wage gap. Finally, based on the theoretical analysis and the empirical analysis, put forward specific recommendations to narrow the relative wage gap.