Trade, money and employment in intertemporal optimizing models of growth

This paper unites elements of Sidrauski's (1967) monetary model of growth, Ventura's (1997) analysis of the effects of international trade on growth, and some work on the labour market implications of growth by Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1995). It was shown by Ventura that, for a small economy, free international trade leads to an increase of the de facto elasticity of substitution between the domestic factors of production. The first part of the paper analyses how such an increase in the elasticity of substitution influences the steady state and the speed of convergence. From the Sidrauski model we know that money is super-neutral in the long-run but that monetary policy can have real effects along the transition path as long as the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is not equal to one. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how these results also depend on the elasticity of substitution between factors of production. The results give some important insights into possible interactions between monetary and trade policy in the long and short run. The last part of the paper deals with a modified version of the monetary growth model, which includes endogenous labour supply as in Klump (1993) or Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1995). In this context, international trade, by increasing the elasticity of substitution, leads to lower domestic employment in the long run whereas monetary policy may be able to increase employment at least in the short run. Thus, under certain circumstances, trade and monetary policy can be regarded as complementary with respect to their labour market effects. © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd.