Made in China, sold in Norway : local labor market effects of an import shock

Abstract

We analyze whether regional labor markets are affected by exposure to import competition from China. We find negative employment effects for low-skilled workers, and observe that low-skilled workers tend to be pushed into unemployment or leave the labor force altogether. We find no evidence of wage effects. We partly expect this in a Nordic welfare state where firms are flexible at the employment margin, while centralized wage bargaining provides less flexibility at the wage margin. Our estimates suggest that import competition from China explains almost 10% of the reduction in the manufacturing em- ployment share from 1996 to 2007 which is half of the effect found by Autor, Dorn and Hanson (2013) for the US.