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The Business Environment in Southern Africa : Issues in Trade and Market Integration - SummaryThis report assesses some of the key
 barriers to greater trade and factor market integration in
 the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). The SADC
 has been a free trade area since 2008, and has an ambitious
 agenda for further trade integration. This report assesses
 the roles that cross-country differences in business
 environments have had in impeding cross-border trade flows
 and the cross-border integration of credit markets and the
 labor market based on the analysis of microeconomic data on
 firms and households. The aim of the assessment is to help
 inform the policy and business environment harmonization
 agenda of the community. The full report discusses and
 illustrates the use of price data in monitoring
 intraregional trade integration. The report evaluates the
 extent of integration of labor markets among members the
 statistical agencies of which regularly collect the minimum
 data required for this purpose, which are South Africa,
 Mauritius, Tanzania, and Zambia. The results show that,
 although there is considerable integration of South
 Africa's labor market with many others in the region,
 the degree of integration is rather low. This reflects the
 fact that both trade and capital flows are far more
 restricted in the region than in places where there is
 greater cross-border labor market integration.
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Export Liberalization, Job Creation and the Skill Premium : Evidence from the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade AgreementThis paper explores how the expansion of
 labor-intensive manufacturing exports resulting from the
 United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2001
 translated into wages of skilled and unskilled workers and
 the skill premium in Vietnam through the channel of labor
 demand. In order to isolate the impacts of trade shock from
 the effects of other market-oriented reforms, a strategy of
 exploiting the regional variation in difference in exposure
 to trade is employed. Using the data on panel individuals
 from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys of 2002
 and 2004, and addressing the issue of endogeneity, the
 results confirm the existence of a Stolper-Samuelson type
 effect. That is, those provinces more exposed to the
 increase in exports experienced relatively larger wage
 growth for unskilled workers and a decline of (or a smaller
 increase in) the relative wages of skilled and unskilled
 workers. During the period 2000-2004, the skill premium
 increased for Vietnam's economy as a whole in the
 sample of panel individuals. Thus, the Stolper-Samuelson
 type effect appears to have mitigated but did not outweigh
 the impacts of other factors that contributed to the rise in
 the skill premium.
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The Gendered Labor Market Impacts of Trade Liberalization : Evidence from BrazilThis paper investigates gender
 differences in the impact of Brazil's trade
 liberalization on labor market outcomes. To identify the
 causal effect of trade reforms, the paper uses
 difference-in-difference estimation exploiting variation
 across microregions in pre-liberalization industry
 composition. The analysis finds that trade liberalization
 reduced male and female labor force participation and
 employment rates, but the effects on men were significantly
 larger. Thereby, tariff reductions contributed to gender
 convergence in labor force participation and employment
 rates. Gender differences are concentrated among the
 low-skilled population and in the tradable sector, where
 male and female workers are most likely to be imperfect substitutes.