Assessing the Impact of Trade Policy on Labor Markets and Production

This paper discusses the measurement of production and employment effects of trade policy, and more broadly the effects of economic integration and globalization. First, it provides a broad-brush overview of the ex-post literature linking trade to performance, such as measures of worker displacement, adjustment costs, and econometric evidence on trade and wages. It then defines structural impact indexes, illustrating their use with a stylized CGE model-based assessment of the impact of EU enlargement on the transition economies. Finally, the last section discusses the gap between our ex-post experience with adjustment costs, and what ex-ante methods actually tell us.