Emigration, Wage Inequality and Vanishing Sectors

Abstract

Emigration leads to finite changes in structure of production and sectors vanish because they cannot pay higher wages. Does emigration of one type of labor hurt the other non-emigrating type in this set up? We demonstrate various scenarios when real income of the emigrating and the non-emigrating type do not move together and in the process generalize some of the existing results in the literature. In particular emigration can lead to a drastic change in the degree of inequality depending on which sectors survive in the post-emigration scenario.