Migration, social standards, and replacement incomes
Subtitle: how to protect low-income workers in the industrialized countries against the forces of globalization and market integration
By: Hans-Werner Sinn.
Contributors: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series ;; working paper 10798; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;; working paper no. 10798.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Subjects: Migrant labor.; Unskilled labor.; Wages.; Labor market.; Globalization -- Economic aspects.
Description: "This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the wages and social benefits of its unskilled workers against wage competition from immigrants.  It shows that fixing social standards harms the workers and that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration into unemployment.  Defending wages with replacement incomes brings about first-order efficiency losses that outweigh the budget cost to the government.  By contrast, wage subsidies involve much smaller welfare losses.  While the exclusion of migrants from a national replacement program does not improve the situation, the (temporary) exclusion of migrants from a national subsidy program makes it possible to avoid a distortion of the migration pattern"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Also available in print.
Includes bibliographical references.
Title from PDF file as viewed on 1/11/2005.
System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.