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GTAP Resources: Resource Display

GTAP Resource #3248

"Labor Statistics for the GTAP Database"
by Weingarden, Alison and Marinos Tsigas


Abstract
General equilibrium analyses of trade issues often rely on labor payments data that are split by industry and by workers’ skill levels. In the past, this labor data has been prepared from a variety of national sources and has been exceedingly difficult to update. By applying matrix balancing procedures, we were able to turn recent internationally comparable wage and employment data from the International Labor Organization (ILO) into labor statistics for the GTAP CGE model. The labor statistics proposed in this paper would divide workers into five skill categories and provide separate wage and employment components.

In our paper we update the GTAP labor splits using several sources of data from the ILO. We are motivated to find a new set of labor splits that are based on more recent data and a larger set of countries. We also expand the GTAP labor data by providing separate price (wages) and quantity (employment) information and a skill split across five occupational categories.

For each country we obtain employment data from the ILO Yearbook of Labour Statistics, which typically allows us to split labor across fifteen industries. Industry average wages are available from the ILO Yearbook of Labour Statistics and wages by job are available from the OWW database (Freeman and Oostendorp, 2000), based on the ILO October Inquiry. To estimate wages by occupation and industry, we devised a method for imputing missing wages by occupation and industry and applied this procedure to 48 countries. We start with wages by job and use a minimization of squared errors approach to fill in missing values. The equations are designed to minimize wage variations within occupations and to give results that satisfy the observed average wages by industry. This updates the employment and wage data to average years of 2004 and 2005, respectively and does not impose any assumptions from one country to another.



Resource Details (Export Citation) GTAP Keywords
Category: 2010 Conference Paper
Status: Published
By/In: Presented at the 13th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, Penang, Malaysia
Date: 2010
Version:
Created: Weingarden, A. (4/12/2010)
Updated: Weingarden, A. (4/12/2010)
Visits: 5,007
- Labor market issues
- The GTAP Data Base and extensions


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