Trade and technology -- and wages

Dani Rodrik makes a great point on his blog about Trade and wages:

I have often read or heard the assertion that there is no respectable work by economists that attributes an important part of rising inequality in the U.S. to international trade, with the implication being that it's all (or mostly) due to skill-biased technological change. Greg Mankiw has made this argument in the past, and Alan Blinder implies as much in his recent NYT article.
I have never understood why the work of Rob Feenstra and Gordon Hanson is overlooked in this context. These two are among the very best empirical trade economists today (and Feenstra is the author of the most widely used graduate-level textbook in trade). In a series of papers, they have argued that outsourcing and global production sharing act just like skill-biased technological change, and they have played an important role in shaping wage inequality. Their empirical work is careful and driven by a compelling theoretical model of within-industry specialization.

Rodrik points to their paper Global Production Sharing and Rising Inequality: A Survey of Trade and Wages, which concludes:

While there is abundant evidence of skill-biased technological change, it also appears that international trade, in the form of foreign outsourcing, contributes to skill upgrading and increases in the skilled-unskilled wage gap.

To some of us, that conclusion makes perfect sense. Not only are the both of these forces at work, they are interrelated and come from the same source. As Levy has pointed out, if your job can be routinized, it can either be automated or done by someone in a lower wage area following instructions.

But that is just the beginning. The next wave of technology-trade interaction is coming as the higher level conceptual jobs gain in other locations.