Managerial versus Production Wages: Offshoring,Country Size,and Endowments

We explore the role of trade in differentiated final goods as well as offshoring of tasks for inequality both within and between countries, emphasizing the distinction between managerial and production labour. We extend Grossman and Rossi‐Hansberg (2012), where task trade is driven by external economies of scale, by considering asymmetric endowments. Identifying possible equilibrium patterns of task trade, we find little scope for two‐way trade if endowments are asymmetric. Our numerical simulations identify non‐monotonicities between the level of offshoring and measures of within‐country as well as between‐country inequality.     

THE EXPORT PERFORMANCE OF U.S. AND SWEDISH MULTINATIONALS

While the U.S. and Sweden both lost more than 20 percent of their shares of world and developed countries' exports of manufactures between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, the export shares of their multinational firms stayed fairly stable or even increased. The multinationals raised the proportion of their worldwide exports that they supplied from their overseas affiliates. These developments suggest that the declines in the trade shares of the US. and Sweden were not due mainly to deterioration in the innovativeness or inventiveness of American and Swedish firms, their management ability or their technological capabilities, but rather to economic developments in the firms' home countries.
The finding that firms have done better as exporters than their home countries is strengthened when we look at different industry groups. In both the U.S. and Sweden, and in all industry groups, with one exception, the multinationals' export shares increased relative to those of their home countries. The margins were often wide, and were mostly larger for Swedish firms than for U.S. firms.
Part of the explanation for the growth of each country's exports and those of its multinationals is the initial composition of exports, or the comparative advantages of the countries and their firms. These were skewed, in the mid-1960s, to industries that were to enjoy rapid growth in the next decade or so. Despite these initial comparative advantages, the exports of both countries fell far behind world export growth.
The comparative advantages of both countries' multinationals were even more biased toward fast-growth industries than those of the countries. That fact partly accounted for the better export performance of the multinationals relative to their home countries, but the multinationals outperformed their countries within each industry as well as for manufacturing as a whole.     

Partisan Cycles in Offshore Outsourcing: Evidence from U.S. Imports

The wage and employment effects of offshoring roil politics in the United States and around the world. Firms that offshore either outsource their activities to unaffiliated businesses, or internalize production by establishing subsidiaries from which they import intrafirm. We argue that the political environment in trade partner countries influences U.S. offshoring patterns in ways that have been ignored in the extant literature. Drawing on the political business cycle literature, we expect higher production costs and lower profits for firms in capital (labor) intensive sectors when the Left (Right) is in power. These partisan cycles, in turn, shape the sectoral composition of exports from the partner to the United States, and the degree to which trade is conducted intrafirm. Under a Left‐ (Right‐) leaning government in a partner country, U.S. intrafirm imports of capital‐ (labor‐) goods increase relative to total imports in these industries. Examining highly disaggregated U.S. import data, we find strong support for our argument. Our results indicate that the effect of partisan governments on offshore outsourcing depends on factor intensities of production, which vary across industries. The degree of internalization in global sourcing is shaped in part by the distributional objectives of partisan governments, and not by economic factors alone.     

异质性与跨国公司的战略选择

新新贸易理论将公司异质性引入到国际贸易理论中,从微观层面解释了公司国际化的战略选择。但它们通常假定两国是同质的,所以公司国际化的选择仅局限于出IZl贸易和水平型直接投资。本文构建了三国模型,考察了跨国公司的三种战略选择模式。理论研究表明,生产率最高的公司选择水平型直接投资,生产率较高的公司选择出口平台直接投资,生产率较低的公司选择出口贸易,生产率最低的公司只供应国内市场。发达国家的相对工人工资水平越高、发展中国家建厂成本越小,选择出口和水平型直接投资的公司会越少,而选择出口平台的直接投资公司会越多。     

基于贸易收支数据的美国贸易逆差与美元汇率相互关系研究

通过选择美国与中国、日本、加拿大、英国和欧元区11国等美国主要贸易伙伴的双边贸易数据作为样本,研究美国的双边贸易逆差与美元汇率之间的关系.实证分析表明,美国对主要贸易伙伴国的双边贸易收支与美元汇率没有实质性联系.美国逼迫其它货币升值没有也不能缓解美国的贸易逆差问题,同样,美国逼迫人民币升值也不能缓解美中双边贸易失衡问题.     

Does Growth Encourage Factor Price Equalization?

This paper first notes the importance of "one-cone" versus "multi-cone" equilibria in the Heckscher–Ohlin model of international trade, then asks whether economic growth in neoclassical growth models leads toward one or the other. The one-cone equilibrium arises with internationally similar factor endowments. It has a single set (cone) of relative factor endowments, within which countries diversify and have global factor price equalization (FPE) under free trade. The multi-cone equilibrium arises with larger factor endowment differences. It has FPE within cones, but not between them. The two configurations differ in important ways. The paper examines several neoclassical trade-and-growth models, distinguished by their assumptions about saving, asking whether factor endowments converge into a single cone. None of the models suggests convergence, while some strongly imply that countries will end up in different cones. This suggests a preference for the multi-cone version of the model.     

Trade, Multinational Sales, and FDI in a Three-factor Model

The overwhelming importance of multinational activities as well as the coexistence of exporters and multinationals within the developed countries demand for theoretical models which provide a convincing explanation of simultaneous two‐way trade and horizontal multinational activities. We present a model with three factors of production to disentangle the two‐fold role of headquarters for their affiliates into a know‐how (headquarters services) and a capital‐serving part (FDI). We simulate the model to derive predictions about the impact of trade costs, plant set‐up costs, fixed multinational network costs, relative country size and factor endowments on exports, multinational sales and FDI. The effects are not uniform for multinational sales and FDI. Whereas exports and affiliate sales increase with the similarity in country size, FDI is more likely to increase monotonously with the sending country's size.     

International Productivity Differences,Trade and the Distributions of Factor Endowments

This paper presents a model of task assignment and worker matching to explore how the distributions of labor endowments within countries influence aggregate productivity and international trade patterns. Higher moments of the skill distribution have complex relationships with the organization of the labor force. First, labor endowments skewed toward high abilities exhibit positive assortment of workers across tasks, while countries with distributions of ability skewed towards low abilities exhibit underemployment. Second, greater dispersion improves aggregate productivity in countries that experience underemployment, but worsens productivity where there is assortative assignment. Furthermore, the shape and size of factor endowments are shown to jointly determine a global pattern of comparative advantage. Countries are more likely to export their abundant factors when labor markets organize heterogenous workers effectively. These predictions receive empirical support from Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries using measures of diversity constructed from educational attainment.     

中美制造业双边贸易对美国相对工资差距的影响研究*

在新古典贸易理论一般均衡的框架之下,运用1997-2014年中美两国的投入产出、贸易和工资数据,本文定量考察了中美制造业产品的双边贸易同美国制造业相对工资差距的关系。结果发现,美国从中国的净进口对美国制造业非熟练劳动力和熟练劳动力相对工资差距扩大存在影响,但影响幅度较小,贸易并不是引起相对收入差距扩大的唯一原因。但随着中美双边制造业贸易的进一步发展,美中贸易对美国工资差距的影响可能越来越大,以保护非熟练劳动力为名对中国产品实施贸易限制的呼声将会更高。     

Endowments,Specialization, and Policy

The paper explores the relationship between industry shares in production and their determinants including factor endowments, technology, and government policies, in a GDP–function framework. We use a new international panel dataset on production and trade compiled by the World Bank. As an intermediate step we calculate Hicks‐neutral productivity indices that vary across industries, time, and countries. We find that own‐TFP is robustly associated with industry shares across time and countries and that, after correcting for these productivity differences, output shares are related to factor endowments (Rybczynski effects) in a plausible way. Once Rybczynski effects are controlled for, we find little evidence of demand‐side policies (import tariffs) affecting the allocation of resources; we find, however, more role for supply‐side policies as the relative size of capital‐intensive industries is positively associated with infrastructure–capital endowments.     

A model of wage and employment effects of service offshoring

This paper develops a two‐sector model of trade in goods and intermediate tasks that differ in tradability and skill intensity. A skill‐abundant country with high productivity is shown to offshore more unskilled tasks than skilled tasks, without relying on a particular correlation structure between tradability and skill intensity. With putty‐clay technology that allows retraining in the long run, transition from the non‐offshoring to the offshoring equilibrium generates wage and employment effects that switch from negative to positive as tradability declines, with the switches occurring at a higher degree of tradability for skilled tasks. This is consistent with the empirical literature.     

Evidence and explanation for the Tariff-lobbying paradox: endogenous Tariffs fall as protectionist lobbying rises

Recent empirical evidence suggests that U.S. protectionist lobbying expenditures rose while U.S. trade barrier fell. We find that the same result holds in our panel data sample from 28 countries between 1995 and 2011. We find two economic drivers cause the paradox between increasing protectionist lobbying and decreasing trade barrier. First, trade barriers decline as country capital-labour ratio endowments rise because of the rising political and economic power of capital that lobbies for free-trade. Second, factor intensities in production become more similar as factor-intensity convergence. This flattens the production possibility curve between exportable and import-competing production so that changes increased magnification in both factor rewards. In our panel, the magnification parameters are twice as high for capital as for labour (8.6 vs. 5.1). And, the elasticity of the capital return with respect to country capital-labour factor endowment ratios (.59) is nearly twice those of labour (.22). Increased magnification causes thus labour’s increased lobbying for protection to be more than offset by increased capital lobbying against protection. In short, while an increasing labour lobbies for protection as countries advance, combined tariff and non-tariff protection (OTRI) decline significantly as advanced countries get richer. This explains the tariff-protectionist-lobbying paradox.     

Understanding the U.S.-China Trade War

ABSTRACT

Three major concerns drove the U.S. into initiating the trade war, and they are (a) the concern that China’s chronically large trade surplus was depressing job creation in the U.S. (b) the concern that China was using illegal and unfair methods to acquire U.S. technology at an effectively discounted price; and (c) the concern that China seeks to weaken U.S. national security and its international standing. On the dispute over China’s exchange rate and trade imbalance, the first conclusion is that it was marked by analytical confusion over the meaning of the term ‘equilibrium exchange rate’. The second conclusion is that China’s trade imbalance reflects the economic conditions in both China and U.S., and that the efficient and fair solution of the problem requires policy changes in both countries. On the industrial policy dispute, the first conclusion is that the issue of forced technology transfer is largely a dispute about China using its market power to benefit itself at the expense of its trade partners. The second conclusion is that China’s use of market power can last only until the other large countries could unite and retaliate as a group. The inevitability of retaliation means that China should replace the joint-venture (JV) mechanism for technological diffusion with other ways to strengthen its technological capability. On the U.S. concern about whether China trade weakens its national security, the first conclusion is that the notion of national security that is commonly adopted in the U.S. trade policy debate is ignorant about the primary determinants of U.S. capability in innovation. By focusing instead mainly on how to hold down China technologically, the long-run outcome will be a technologically weaker U.S. and hence, a more vulnerable U.S. The second conclusion is that the U.S. must identify a clear, short list of critical technologies and critical infrastructure for the recently reformed Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to cover, and update this list constantly. Otherwise, the broad and changing nature of notions about national security would allow the bureaucratically driven phenomenon of mission-creep to steadily expand the coverage of the CFIUS process, thereby steadily rendering CFIUS to be operationally capricious. Our principal policy suggestion to China is that, because China’s economy in 2018 is very different from that in 1978 (e.g. many parts of China now look like Singapore and China is Africa’s biggest donor), there should be more reciprocity in China’s trade and investment relations with the advanced economies despite China’s status as a developing economy under WTO rules. Our principal policy suggestion to President Trump is to stop equating strategic competition with economic competition. Strategic competition is normally a zero-sum game. While fair economic competition is usually a zero-sum game in the short run, it generally creates a win-win outcome in the long run.     

美国在华直接投资对中美贸易不平衡的影响研究

20世纪90年代以来,美国在华直接投资额呈迅速上升趋势,中美贸易规模也不断扩大,与此同时,两国的贸易差额也逐年增大,双边贸易的不平衡加剧了贸易摩擦。本文首先从美国在华投资对中美贸易差额所产生的各种效应阐述了中美贸易失衡的原因,然后通过实证分析得出美国在华直接投资与中美贸易顺差之间存在长期协整关系的结论,即美国在华直接投资是导致中美贸易顺差的决定性因素。最后提出缓解中美贸易不平衡的相关对策建议。     

Identifying foreign suppliers in U.S. import data

Relationships between firms and their foreign suppliers are the foundation of international trade, but data limitations and reliability concerns make studying such relationships challenging. We evaluate and enhance supplier information in U.S. import data and present new facts about importer–exporter relationships. Count of foreign exporters from U.S. import data tends to exceed those from source country data, especially from China. The pattern of U.S. imports from origin countries changes substantially by tracing trade back to the supplier's location instead. Related‐party relationships trade more, while larger countries have more relationships.     

Trade Openness,Corruption and Factor Abundance: Evidence from a Dynamic Panel

Using the Heckscher–Ohlin–Samuelson–Vanek (HOSV) framework, this paper illustrates a relationship between corruption and the pattern of international trade that depends on the factor endowments of countries. The relationship between trade openness and corruption is empirically investigated by using a panel dataset on trade openness, corruption and capital–labor ratio, and applying estimation techniques developed for dynamic panels. The regression results provide strong support to the hypothesis that the effect of corruption on trade openness depends on relative factor abundance.     

Integration of world leaders and emerging powers into the Malaysian stock market: A DCC-MGARCH approach

This paper examines the financial integration of two world leaders (the U.S. and Japan) and two emerging powers (China and India) into the Malaysian stock market. A DCC-MGARCH approach is employed to examine the correlations among these countries in a time-variant manner to indicate the degree of financial integration among the countries. It is found that the financial integration between Malaysia and China started to evolve in April 2004. Strong financial integration between the stock markets in India and Malaysia was observed. In contrast, the volatility spillover effect from the U.S. to Malaysia disappeared, especially in the short term. Nevertheless, the study suggests that in the long run, investors in Malaysia could gain by diversifying their portfolios in China and Japan relative to India and the U.S.     

Impact of exchange-rate variability on commodity trade between U.S. and Germany

Previous studies that looked at the impact of exchange rate volatility on trade flows used aggregate trade data between one country and rest of the world or between two countries. More recent studies, however, have expanded the literature by using a highly disaggregated commodity level data between two countries. In this paper we consider the sensitivity of 131 industries that trade between U.S. and Germany. We find that exports and imports of a majority of the industries react to the real dollar–euro volatility in the short run. The short-run effects, however, last into the long run only in almost 50 % of the industries. Among these industries, while almost all U.S. exporting industries are affected favorably by exchange rate volatility, a majority of the U.S. importing industries are affected adversely.     

中国对外贸易失衡的影响因素*——基于贸易增加值（TiVA）测算数据的实证分析

中国持续对外贸易顺差引起了学者们的广泛关注。然而现有文献大都基于传统贸易统计方法，没有考虑全球价值链背景下中间品多次跨越国界的重复计算问题，无法反映中国真实的贸易顺差水平。本文基于WIOD数据库1995-2011年的数据，采用投入产出领域的贸易增加值（TiVA）方法，测算出中国与38个贸易伙伴之间的增加值贸易顺差，并对其影响因素进行了实证分析。研究发现，中国加入WTO之前人民币汇率升值对贸易顺差的影响较小而且不显著，而加入WTO之后，人民币汇率升值可以有效降低中国的贸易顺差。在华FDI总额对贸易顺差的影响呈现出相似的特点，即加入WTO之前，总体FDI不显著，加入之后影响显著。FDI来源地区分析显示，美国和亚洲四小龙在中国内地FDI增加可以显著提升中国内地的贸易顺差，而日本和德国在华FDI则会降低中国内地的贸易顺差。     

What drives cross-country differences in export variety? A bilateral panel approach

A worldwide event like the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak can only reinforce the interest in modelling trade diversification as a key factor in countries’ vulnerability to external shocks. This paper adopts a detailed relative framework to study the determinants of product-level export variety in a large bilateral panel of developing and developed economies (16,770 country pairs in the period 1988–2014). We find that country pairs characterized by large differentials in productivity and in the makeup of the labour force differ in export variety patterns. This result holds after controlling for other endowments and for trade costs. Further, productivity plays a significant role in the reduction of export variety dissimilarities between countries belonging to different income groups. Hence, without successful technological convergence the low-income economies will not be able to reduce their exposure to export risk.