Domestic Distortions and the Deindustrialization Hypothesis

It is widely believed that U.S. trade deficits have displaced workers from highly paid manufacturing jobs into less well-paid service employment, contributing to declining incomes for the nation as a whole. Although proponents of this view do not usually think of it this way, this analysis falls squarely into the `domestic distortions' framework pioneered by Jagdish Bhagwati. This paper models the deindustrialization hypothesis explicitly as a domestic distortions issue, and shows that while it makes conceptual sense it is of limited quantitative importance.