Trade shocks and economic development Three essays on the effects of international trade shocks on labour market outcomes and firm performances

This thesis analyses the impact of three different trade shocks on labour market outcomes and firms’ performance. The first chapter evaluates the impact of an increase in import competition on employment, gender employment gap and structural transformation in Ethiopia over the 1994-2013 period. In the second chapter, the objective is to investigate the changes in the Egyptian trade policies on wages and job stability, with a panel dataset covering a 20 years period (1998-2018); the last chapter examines the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on firms with different modes of internationalization, in terms of changes in sales and in business strategies. By exploiting three different very rich micro-level datasets, we study trade shocks under three different perspectives: a worker-level perspective, a firm-level perspective and a local labour market perspective. What emerges is that the impact of trade shocks is ultimately an empirical question, and that the direction of results greatly depends on the economic context under analysis. When trade liberalization is implemented in countries whose structural transformation process is still at an early stage, as in the Ethiopian case, this can harm rather than benefit their economies. On the other hand, the evidence in the third chapter suggests that being interconnected in the international market can help firms mitigating the shock, not only when the shock is domestic or idiosyncratic, but also, as in the case of Covid-19, when the it affects the whole global economy.