Is employment globalizing?

While work within many industries increasingly involves competition and cooperation with workers in other countries, we show that national labor markets have not necessarily globalized very fast. This is because the most globally intertwined industries have tended to shed workers to less globally connected industries, creating a de-globalizing, between-industry countertrend. We characterize between- and within-industry trends in three measures of labor market globalization over timespans of 16-50 years in 40-68 countries. We also clarify which policy debates each measure is most relevant to. While our results strongly support this globalization within-industries, deglobalization between-industries story, they also underscore how few empirically defensible conclusions can be drawn about trends in some dimensions of labor market globalization. The idea that nations’ labor markets have globalized dramatically in recent decades, and that this calls for economy-wide overhaul of policies and institutions, rests on rather little empirical evidence.