Assignment title: Information
Consider the data contained the following excel files that I extracted from the World
Input-Output Database (WIOD). This data is publicly available at www.wiod.org.
I) Canadian Endowments.xlsx
This data set contains three variables: year (the year of the data), S (millions of
hours worked by skilled workers in Canada), and U (millions of hours worked by
unskilled workers in Canada).
II) Canadian Trade.xlsx
This data set contains 6 variables for the year 2005: source (the origin of exports),
destination (the destination of the exports from "source"), industry (the industry
the data refers to), as (the unit skilled labor requirement for the production of
output in industry in the source country), au (the unit unskilled labor requirement
for the production of output in industry in the source country), X (the value of
exports from source to destination in industry in millions of units).
For this final data set, all imports into Canada are transformed into negative
numbers for easy summation in the questions below. For example, Canada
imported 238.1928 millions of units of Agriculture from Mexico in 2005 and
exported 5508.444 units of textiles to the world in the same year.
Questions
a) What was the relative endowment of skilled to unskilled workers (S/U) in 2005? Use
the following equation to then solve for ws/wu as implied by observed endowments when
we do not take the factor content of trade into account?
!!
!!
= !!"#
!!"#
!!.!
.
b) Define exports from country c to country d in industry j as �!
!,!. In addition, define the
unit input requirement for factor f in the production of good j in country c as �!,!
! . The net
(exports-imports) factor f content of trade for Canada can then be defined as follows
�!
!"# = �!,!
!"#�!
!"#,!"#$%
!
− �!,!
! �!
!,!"#
!,!
where f indexes factors, j indexes industries and d indexes source countries.
What was the skilled labor factor content of net (exports-imports) trade for Canada in
2005? What was the unskilled labor factor content of net (exports-imports) trade for
Canada in 2005?
c) Define the "factor content of trade adjusted endowment" of each factor in Canada as
�!"# = �!"# − �!
!"#
�!"# = �!"# − �!
!"#.
Use the following equation to solve for relative wages taking the factor content of trade
into account
�!
�!
= �!"#
�!"#
!!.!
By what proportion does the skill premium increase or decrease when we take trade into
account?