Globalization and the distribution of income: the economic arguments

One of the issues currently being debated in the ongoing discussion of the pros and cons of today's globalization concerns the effects of greater world trade as well as of the changes in technology on a country's internal distribution of income, especially on skilled versus unskilled wage rates. In this article, I attempt to spell out some of the arguments concerning internal income distribution that have been put forth both by labor economists and international trade theorists. The impact of globalization on the wage premium between the skilled and unskilled may not be as obvious as is first imagined.