期刊名称:Discussion Paper / Département des Sciences Économiques de l'Université Catholique de Louvain
印刷版ISSN:1379-244X
出版年度:2009
卷号:1
出版社:Université catholique de Louvain
摘要:Although movements of capital, goods and services are growing in importance,
workers movements are impeded by restrictive policies in rich countries. Such regulations
carry substantial economic costs for developing countries, and prevent global
inequality from declining. Even if rich countries are averse to global inequality, a single
country lacks incentives to welcome additional migrants as it would bear the costs
alone while the benefits accrue to all rich states. Aversion to global inequality confers
a public good nature to the South-North migration of low-skill workers. We propose
an alternative allocation of labor maximizing global welfare subject to the constraints
that the rich countries are at least as well off as in the current “nationalist” (or “Nashionalist”)
situation. This “no regret” allocation can be decentralized by a tax-subsidy
scheme which makes people internalize the fact that as soon as a rich country welcomes
an additional migrant, global inequalities are reduced, and everybody in the rich world
is better off too. Our model is calibrated using statistics on immigration, working-age
population and output. We simulate the proposed scheme on different sets of rich
countries.