The Impact Of Imports From Low-wage Countries On The Structure Change Of US Manufacturing Industry: From 1990 To 2005

Since the 1990s , as the influence of economic globalization expands, a series of structural changes have taken place in the world economic pattern, these changes have caused the adjustment of industrial structure and the reorganization of international division in the developed country. These countries, such as United States, when making great efforts to keep the monopoly position of new and high technology, are carrying on a new round of optimized distribution of manufacturing industries' resources in the world. But this process inevitably up against the compressive stress and challenge from inside and outside the country, especially the import competition from low-wage countries brought U.S. manufacturing plants with tremendous competitive pressures. These phenomena made some of the interest groups and unemployed men condemned the great deal of imports from low-wage countries, thus affected American trade policy to low-wage countries. As China will belong to low-wage countries in the long period of the future, it is important to analyze the impact of import competition from low-wage countries on the change of U.S. manufacturing structure, which will provide us with important theoretic and practical instruction to grasp the change of the international competition circumstance.The paper mainly focus on two topics: the first topic presents the developing track of U.S. manufacturing industry and it's development status in quo .In the same chapter, the change of U.S. manufacturing industry structure is also discussed in such respects as the changes of output, employment, import and output situation for each sector of U.S manufacturing industry. The latter topic starts with data illuminations and empirical analysis, and take full advantage of some regression models to demonstrate how the imports from low-wage countries impact structural changes of U.S. manufacturing industry, including its change of output , employment , export growth and factor intensity.Through all these analysis and research, the main conclusion of this paper can be sum up as follows:Firstly, the basic uptrend of U.S manufacturing industry is to switch the sectors of labor-intensive or with low technology level to the sectors with higher capital intensity and skill intensity, upgrading the level of U.S. manufacturing industry structure further.Secondly, I find that competition from low-wage countries -as measured by the share of imports originating in countries with less than 5% of US per capita GDP-is associated with declining output and employment in certain sectors of US...