Overview

Abstract (English)

For the Taiwan-born male and female wage earners in America and Canada, this paper attempts to find their wage gaps between the two host countries and to explain the wage gaps by three factors (educational attainment, the age at entering the host country, and the recency of the entry) in the context of current age. We apply an exponential regression model to the micro data of the 2005-2007 American Community Survey and the 2006 Canadian census. Predicted overall wage gaps are separated into two components: structural and compositional. Our main findings are as follows. The inferiority in mean wage of the Taiwan-born in Canada relative to the Taiwan-born in America is extremely large (by 50% for males and 55% for females). Educational attainment and entry age, but not entry period, are found to be very important in accounting for these wage gaps. From the perspectives of both educational attainment and entry age, the Taiwan-born have not only a lower wage structure but also a less favorable composition in Canada than in America. Our main findings support the ideas that potential immigrants tend to rank America higher than Canada, and that the severe competition for limited number of immigrant visas results in a sorting process that yields a higher probability of entering America for those of higher quality. They also reflect the fact that a high proportion of the Taiwan-born in Canada escaped from Taiwan in the1990s in response to the confrontational relation between Taiwanese and Chinese governments and to the military threat of China.

Abstract (French)

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