TY  - JOUR
AU  - Sinn,Hans-Werner
TI  - Migration, Social Standards and Replacement Incomes: How to Protect Low-income Workers in the Industrialized Countries Against the Forces of Globalization and Market Integration
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10798
PY  - 2004
Y2  - September 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10798
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10798.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Hans-Werner Sinn
Ifo Institute -
Leibniz Institute for Economic Research
at University of Munich
Poschingerstr. 5
81679 Munich
GERMANY
Tel: 49-89-21802748
Fax: 49-89-397303;49-89-8506434 (home)
E-Mail: sinn@ifo.de
AB  - This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the wages and social benefits of its unskilled workers against wage competition from immigrants. It shows that fixing social standards harms the workers and that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration into unemployment. Defending wages with replacement incomes brings about first-order efficiency losses that outweigh the budget cost to the government. By contrast, wage subsidies involve much smaller welfare losses. While the exclusion of migrants from a national replacement program does not improve the situation, the (temporary) exclusion of migrants from a national subsidy program makes it possible to avoid a distortion of the migration pattern.
ER  -