全球化，外包和工资不均衡外文翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 原文 Globalization, Outsourcing, and Wage Inequality Material Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 86, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Hundredth and Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association San Francisco, CA, January 5-7, 1996 (May, 1996), pp. 240-245 Author: ROBERT C. FEENSTRA AND GORDON H. HANSON Since the late 1970s, the wages of less-skilled U.S. workers have fallen dramatically, both in real terms and relative to the wages of more-skilled U.S. workers. There is consider-able debate over whether international trade has contributed to the declining economic for-tunes of the less skilled (Richard Freeman, 1995; J. David Richardson, 1995). Skeptics about the role of globalization in U.S. wage changes claim that technological innovation is a more plausible explanation for the shift toward skilled labor. While technology is surely an important contributing factor to ris-ing wage inequality in the United States, the current trade-versus-technology debate ob-scures a more fundamental question about how firms respond to import competition and how these responses, in turn, are transmitted to the labor market In previous work, we have argued that out-sourcing, by which we mean the import of intermediate inputs by domestic firms, has contributed to an increase in the relative de-mand for skilled labor in the United States (Feenstra and Hanson, 1996). This feature of globalization-the fragmentation of produc-tion into discrete activities which are then al-located across countries-has received little attention in the literature. If firms respond to import competition from low-wage coun-tries by moving non-skill-intensive activities abroad, then trade will shift employment to-ward skilled workers within industries. Most previous studies of the labor-market effects of trade presume that import competition shifts resources across industries, without changing their internal composition. Ignor-ing outsourcing misse