Technology, Not Trade, Doomed U.S. Steel Jobs

By: Allan Collard-Wexler

Globalization is often blamed for loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. But in the steel industry, the numbers tell a different story. Duke University economist Allan Collard-Wexler and a Princeton colleague examined 40 years of data and found that the U.S. steel industry shed hundreds of thousands of jobs between 1963 and 2002, but not primarily from globalization. The chief cause, instead, was improved technology.

Read more:

http://www.marketplace.org/2016/08/09/world/steels-decline-was-about-technology-not-trade-0

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-largely-false-globalization-narrative/2016/08/07/7a095582-5b25-11e6-9aee-8075993d73a2_story.html

http://microeconomicinsights.org/productivity-impact-new-technology-evidence-us-steel-industry/

Allan Collard-Wexler is an associate professor of economics at Duke who studies industrial organization, including the steel, concrete and newspaper industries.