This chapter examines whether the trends in skill bias observed in the United States are common to other economies and extends the time series analysis to include capital. It first estimates, for each country, the skill bias from data on the relative supply of skills and the relative wages of skilled workers before constructing labor supply in units of equivalent unskilled workers. Finally, it calculates the augmentation coefficients using data on overall labor and capital shares. The results show that skill-biased technical change is a remarkably global phenomenon and that every country registers a positive trend in the relative efficiency of skilled labor. When the elasticity of substitution between two inputs is less than 1, technology choice shifts toward the input that becomes more scarce.
