Factor Immobility and Regional Impacts of Trade Liberalization Evidence on Poverty from India

By P. Topalova. Social Science Research Network, 2010

841 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper uses the 1991 Indian trade liberalization to measure the impact of trade liberalization on poverty, and to examine the mechanisms underpinning this impact. Variation in sectoral composition across districts and liberalization intensity across production sectors allows a difference-in-difference approach. Rural districts, in which production sectors more exposed to liberalization were concentrated, experienced slower decline in poverty and lower consumption growth. The impact of liberalization was most pronounced among the least geographically mobile, at the bottom of the income distribution, and in Indian states where inflexible labor laws impeded factor reallocation across sectors.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8435ab22e06136308d1be48d87bb89866f5b05a

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Citations in the corpus

Trade Integration, Market Size, and Industrialization: Evidence from China's National Trunk Highway System (2014, neutral): “Alternatively, the result could be driven by factor market rigidities and related to the frequent empirical finding that the inter-sectoral reallocation of resources following trade shocks fails to be confirmed in the data (Goldberg and Pavcnik, 2007; Topalova, 2010).”
Food Prices, Wages, and Welfare in Rural India (2013, neutral): “While my estimation strategy is related to the “differential exposure approach” (Goldberg and Pavcnik 2007) employed in studies of the local wage impacts of tariff reform (most recently in Topalova 2010; McCaig 2011; and Kovak 2010, 2013), there are several novel elements.”
Trade policy uncertainty and innovation: Firm level evidence from China’s WTO accession (2020, neutral): “As suggested by Topalova (2010), the premise is that we should not expect any significant effect of TPU during this period since it does not change much.”
Retail Globalization and Household Welfare: Evidence from Mexico (2015, neutral): “Rather than relying on state level price deflators as in Topalova (2010) or earlier work by Deaton and Tarozzi (2000), or on household consumption surveys in combination with simulated price changes at the level of aggregate product groups as in Porto (2006) and earlier work by Deaton (1989), or…”
Air Quality and Manufacturing Firm Productivity: Comprehensive Evidence from China (2017, neutral): “AOD measures the extinction of the solar beam by dust and haze and can be used to predict pollution even in areas lacking ground-based monitoring stations (Gupta et al., 2006; van Donkelaar et al., 2010; Kumar et al., 2011).”
Globalization and wage inequality: Evidence from urban China (2012, neutral): “An alternative strategy is to calculate the measures of wage inequality at the city level and use city-year as the unit of analysis (e.g., Topalova (2010)).”
The Return to Protectionism* (2019, neutral): “…policy uses ex post variation in tariffs across sectors to assess effects on sectors (e.g., Attanasio, Goldberg, and Pavcnik 2004), regions (e.g., Topalova 2010; Kovak 2013; Dix-Carneiro and Kovak 2017), firms (e.g., Amiti and Konings 2007; Goldberg et al. 2010; Bustos 2011), or workers (e.g.,…”
Margins of labor market adjustment to trade (2019, neutral): “…in tradable or nontradable sectors; and (iv) do 1Other papers using a similar approach include Costa, Garred and Pessoa (2016), Edmonds, Pavcnik and Topalova (2010), Hakobyan and McLaren (2016), Hasan, Mitra and Ural (2006), Hasan, Mitra, Ranjan and Ahsan (2012), Kondo (2014), McCaig (2011),…”
The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States (2013, neutral): “An alternative approach would be to use a Heckscher-Ohlin or a specific-factors model, as in Topalova (2005, 2010) or Kovak (2013), in which the mapping is strictly from trade prices to wages and employment.”
Export Markets and Labor Allocation in a Low-Income Country (2018, neutral): “5 See Menezes-Filho and Muendler (2011), Kovak (2011), Topalova (2007, 2010), Attanasio, Goldberg, and Pavcnik (2004) and studies surveyed in Goldberg and Pavcnik (2007) for evidence on trade and labor reallocation in response to unilateral import tariff liberalizations.”
Made in China, Sold in Norway: Local Labor Market Effects of an Import Shock (2015, neutral): “…the Norwegian manufacturing sector and changes in China’s export capacity in these differ- 2Seminal studies exploiting regional variations in exposure to trade shocks largely focus on trade shocks arising from changes in trade policy; see e.g. Topalova (2010), Chiquiar (2008), and Kovak (2013).”
Trade Liberalization and Markup Dispersion: Evidence from China's WTO Accession (2015, positive): “To further check our identifying assumption, we conduct two placebo tests: one using only the pre-WTO data as by Topalova (2010), and the other using the sample of processing traders.”