Management

GIDEON ROBERT UNIVERSITY

1.0 Introduction

Studying the implications of trade liberalizations on wages and employment has always been an important topic in the open economy macroeconomics literature; and special attention has been devoted to understanding its effects on development and human resource planning at macro level (Ostry and Rose, 1992; Papageorgiou et al. 1990). The recent experiences of several countries that have under-Most of the economic literature considers that trade liberalization leads to an increase in welfare derived from an improved allocation of domestic resources. There are improvements for instance in wages and employment opportunities. Trade liberalization encourages investments and job creation. This, in turn, will generate growth in the short to medium term as the country adjusts to a new allocation of resources more in keeping with its comparative advantage (McCulloch et al., 2001). Research has show that this process is neither smooth nor automatic and may take some time (Matusz and Tarr, 1999).