Top Highlights

• Earnings inequality is calculated as the ratio of annual earnings at the 90th percentile of the earnings distribution to earnings at the 10th percentile. Male inequality is growing in both the most and the least trade-affected industries, and it is growing at the same rate—47 percent between 1969 and 1993.
• if we follow the advice of Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan and erect a new wall of trade protection, we would do little to ease the plight of less-skilled workers. Too many other forces are conspiring to push their wages down.
• Nations throughout the industrialized world have seen income disparities rise since the late 1970s.
• In The Trap, a bestseller in Western Europe, Sir James Goldsmith argues that free trade with low-wage countries has harmed and threatens to impoverish low-skilled and middle-class workers in the advanced industrial countries.
• Patrick Buchanan has called for an “equalization tax” on imports from third world countries to protect American workers against competition from Asian and Latin American workers who may be paid one-tenth the U.S. industrial wage.

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