Liberalização comercial, mudanças tecnológicas e mercado de trabalho no Brasil

Abstract

This paper analyses the impact of trade liberalization on the labor market in Brazil during 1989-1998, based on the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) model. The main contribution to the literature is the inclusion of the high productivity gains experimented in the country as an additional determinant of wages and employment, along with the trade openness process. We apply the HOS consistency check and mandated wages estimation on data for the Brazilian manufacturing sector. In order to analyze the openness impact on employment, isolating technological shocks, we propose two additional tests. The first one is a consistency check test that relates production changes to the use of workers by skill; and the second one estimates the average changes in the use of production factors in production coming from the trade liberalization. The results obtained show that both openness and technological changes had significant effects on the Brazilian labor market, being broadly consistent with HOS. Trade liberalization decreased income inequality (as measured by the skilled wage premium) and increased the employment of the less skill-intensive industries; however the technological changes had the opposite impact on the labor market.