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This conference volume asks what impact globalization has on poverty. Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor?
This paper quantifies the magnitude and nature of migration flows from the Caribbean and estimates their costs and benefits. The Caribbean countries have lost 10?40 percent of their labor force due to emigration to OECD member countries. The migration rates are particularly striking for the high-skilled. Many countries have lost more than 70 percent of their labor force with more than 12 years of completed schooling?among the highest emigration rates in the world. The region is also the world?s largest recipient of remittances as a percent of GDP. Remittances constituted about 13 percent of the region's GDP in 2002. Simple welfare calculations (under very conservative assumptions of elasticities) suggest that the losses due to high-skill migration (ceteris paribus) outweigh the official remittances to the Caribbean region.
This paper presents the first econometric study of the effect of emigration on national wages in a source country. I examine empirically the effect of Mexican emigration to the United States on wages in Mexico using data from the Mexican and US censuses from 1970-2000. The main result in the paper is that emigration has a strong and positive effect on Mexican wages. There is also evidence for increasing wage inequality in Mexico due to emigration. Simple welfare calculations based on a labor demand-supply framework suggest that the aggregate welfare loss to Mexico due to emigration is small. However, there is a significant distributional impact between labor and other factors.
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