IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bon/boncrc/crctr224_2023_189v2.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Skill-Biased Imports, Skill Acquisition, and Migration

Author

Listed:
  • Jingting Fan
  • Lei Li

Abstract

Imported capital goods, which embody skill-complementary technologies, can increase the supply of skills in developing countries. Focusing on China and using a shift-share design, we show that city-level capital goods import growth increases the local skill share and that both skill acquisition and migration play a role. We develop and quantify a spatial equilibrium model with these two mechanisms to examine the aggregate effects of capital goods imports, accounting for trade and migration linkages between cities. Counterfactual experiments suggest that the growth in capital goods imports in China between 2000 and 2010 led to a 3.7-8.9 million increase in the stock of college graduates, representing 5.7-13% of the total increase over this period. However, this growth disproportionately favored coastal regions, exacerbating existing spatial disparities.

Suggested Citation

  • Jingting Fan & Lei Li, 2023. "Skill-Biased Imports, Skill Acquisition, and Migration," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2023_189v2, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2023_189v2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp189
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chen, Wen & Xue, Wei, 2024. "The impact of capital goods trade liberalization on regional labor market in China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Imported capital goods; capital-skill complementarity; skill acquisition; migration;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • F16 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade and Labor Market Interactions
    • F66 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - Labor
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2023_189v2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CRC Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.crctr224.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.