The Effects of Trade Reform on Labour Mobility Across South African Local Labour Markets

The extent to which labour market are affected by trade liberalization depends crucially on their ease of reallocating labour and factors of production across regions and sectors of the economy. However, previous literature has provided little insight on the role of migration and labour market frictions in shaping the effects of trade reform across regions in South Africa (SA). This paper considers this key question by observing the effect of tariff reform on the spatial reallocation of labour across sectors and regions over the period, 1996 to 2011. Overall, tariff reductions on imports in SA has induced spatial reallocation of labour in SA with a dominant flow of labour from regions/sectors with characteristically high tariff reductions towards regions/sectors of low tariff reductions. Critically, the paper finds that pull factors assimilated through the import competition channel have a positive significant effect on the migration rate, while the opposing push effect is insignificant.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

School of Economics

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Cox, Kerryn

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/29722

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/29722