In The News

January 23, 2007
The model of comparative advantage built on the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo has rarely been challenged as the predominant rationale for international trade. With individual tasks of all sorts increasingly shipped overseas, some economists seek new theories to explain the logic behind the offshoring of services. Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, for example, have labeled...
January 19, 2007
A new World Bank report shows that migration remains a significant force in Eastern Europe and Central Asia almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the initial surge of migration in the 1990s was due to ethnic reconsolidation, there has been a growing movement of workers seeking economic opportunity from the region’s poorer nations. According to the report, the remittances...
Evan Perez January 18, 2007
After federal agents raided chicken and meat processors in 2006, many immigrant workers fled their jobs. In rural Georgia, one company raised wages by $1 and recruited local workers, most African Americans. Since then, company officials have had to deal with more complaints about work conditions, pay disputes and workplace rights, reports this article in “The Wall Street Journal.” Injury rates...
Daniel Altman January 10, 2007
Analysts may argue that globalization has passed its peak, while encouraging terror, crime and disease. But such analysis ignores the data, argues Daniel Altman who writes a globalization column for “The International Herald Tribune.” Exports of merchandise and trade in commercial services increased by 60 percent, value of global mergers and acquisitions increased by almost 40 percent, and...
Jagdish Bhagwati January 10, 2007
Confronting wage stagnation, US labor groups blame trade and immigration from developing countries. But economic research does not support the assertion that competition with developing nations reduces either wages or bargaining power, argues Columbia University professor Jagdish Bhagwali of Columbia University. If anything, ongoing technological innovations reduce the need for unskilled labor,...
Andrew Leonard January 5, 2007
Immigrants contributed to more than 25 percent of new engineering and technology start-up firms in the US between 1995 and 2005, according to a study from Duke University’s Master of Engineering Management Program and the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. Companies started by immigrants produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 in 2005. Notably, firms with...
Dominic Casciani December 26, 2006
If not for immigration, the UK would experience a drop in population, considering about 10 percent of British citizens choose to live abroad. Both young and retired Brits try living overseas, and most are professionals. "Britain is truly at the crossroads of the global movement of people," said Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, a co-author of the report for the Institute of Public Policy...