Assessment of regional trade and virtual water flows in China

The success of China's economic development has left deep marks on resource availability and quality. Some regions in China are relatively poor with regards to water resources. This problem is exacerbated by economic growth. Flourishing trade activities on both domestic and international levels have resulted in significant amounts of water withdrawal and water pollution. Hence the goal of this paper is to evaluate the current inter-regional trade structure and its effects on water consumption and pollution via ‘virtual water flows’. Virtual water is the water embedded in products and used in the whole production chain, and that is traded between regions or exported to other countries. For this assessment of trade flows and effects on water resources, we have developed an extended regional input-output model for eight hydro-economic regions in China to account for virtual water flows between North and South China. The findings show that the current trade structure in China is not very favorable with regards to water resource allocation and efficiency. North China as a water scarce region virtually exports about 5% of its total available freshwater resources while accepting large amounts of wastewater for other regions' consumption. By contrast, South China a region with abundant water resources is virtually importing water from other regions while their imports are creating waste water polluting other regions' hydro-ecosystems.     

虚拟水、虚拟水贸易理论研究综述

相对于水价和用水技术能够提高水资源在当地的配置效率,虚拟水贸易则可以提高水资源在全球范围内的配置效率。虚拟水从水资源生产率较高的国家流向水资源较低的国家意味着在全球层次上水资源的节约。因此,国家之间、洲际之间虚拟水贸易被看作提高全球水资源利用效率和缺水国家获得水安全的一个有力工具。     

虚拟水贸易及其影响因素研究

由于水资源的分布不均和大量消耗,水资源短缺成为很多国家和地区经济社会发展的约束。虚拟水贸易作为一种解决水资源短缺的方式被提出,成为水资源研究领域的热点。以农产品的国际贸易为主体的虚拟水国际贸易也不仅仅涉及水资源的平衡问题,还涉及到很多政治、经济等因素。本文从政治、经济、社会、生态四方面对虚拟水贸易的影响因素进行分析,从而对虚拟水贸易展开研究。     

Are virtual water “flows” in Spanish grain trade consistent with relative water scarcity?

Virtual water adds a new dimension to international trade, and brings along a new perspective about water scarcity and water resource management. Most virtual water literature has focused on quantifying virtual water “flows” and on its application to ensure water and food security. Nevertheless, the analysis of the potential gains from international trade, at least from a water resources perspective, needs to take into account both spatial and temporal variations of blue (groundwater and stream flow) and green (soil moisture) water, as well as the socioeconomic and policy conditions. This paper evaluates whether Spanish international trade with grains is consistent with relative water scarcity. For this purpose, the study estimates the volume and economic value of virtual water “flow” through international grain trade for the period 1997-2005, which includes 3 years with different rainfall levels. The calculations show that Spain is a net virtual water “importer” through international grain trade. The volume of net virtual water “imports” amounts to 3420, 4383 and 8415 million m³ in wet (1997), medium (1999) and dry (2005) years, respectively. Valuing blue water at its shadow price or scarcity value, blue water “exports” oscillate between 0.7 and 34.2 million Euros for a wet and dry year, respectively. Overall, grain trade is apparently consistent with relative water scarcity as net imports increase in dry years. However, the evolution of grain exports, expressed as a variation in quantity and volume, does not match the variations in resource scarcity. A disaggregated crop analysis reveals that there are other factors, such as quality, product specialization or the demand for a standardized product, which also influence trade decisions and are not included in the notion of virtual water. These facts, among others, can therefore create potential distortions in the application of virtual water to the analysis of specific trade patterns. Nevertheless, from a water resources perspective, virtual water can bring important insights across countries for improving water and land management globally, fostering adaptation strategies to climate change and to transboundary resource management.     

外商直接投资对中国对外贸易影响的实证分析

本文以中国和其它24个国家或地区的最近3年的外贸和外资的实际数据为基础,用统计计量学方法对外商直接投资(FDI)和国际贸易关系进行实证研究,定量论证了FDI的贸易促进作用,在此基础上,还对中国与各个国家或地区之间贸易规模差异进行了阐述.     

Gains and losses from potential bilateral US–China trade retaliation

Two closely related numerical general equilibrium models of world trade are used to analyze the potential consequences of US–China bilateral retaliation on trade flows and welfare. One is a conventional Armington trade model with five regions, the US, China, EU, Japan and the Rest of the World, and calibrated to a global 2009 micro consistent data set. The other is a modified version of this model with monetary non-neutrals and including China's trade surplus as an endogenous variable.Who may gain or loss from global trade conflicts spawned by adjustment pressures in the post crisis world is much debated. In a US–China trade conflict, Europe and Japan would seem gainers from preferential access to US and Chinese markets. The loss of markets would hurt the US, but moving closer to an optimal tariff could be the source of terms of trade gains. And the ease of substitution across trading partners' practices would determine costs for China.Results from the conventional model suggest that retaliation between the two countries can be welfare improving for the US as it substitutes expenditures into own goods and improve its terms of trade with non-retaliatory regions, while China and non-retaliatory regions may be adversely affected. Results in the endogenous trade surplus model from the central case model specification, however, suggest that both the US and the EU (the deficit regions) have welfare losses in most cases, while the surplus region, China, and the ROW have welfare gains. In both models, when the bilateral tariff rates are very high, gains accrue to the EU and Japan from trade diversion if the substitutions elasticities of imports are high. Costs are borne by the US and China in lost exports, lowered terms of trade and adjustment costs at home.     

OLD WINE IN A NEW BOTTLE: TRADE OPENNESS AND FDI FLOWS—ARE THE EMERGING ECONOMIES CONVERGING?

This study uses the club convergence methodology of Phillips and Sul (2007) for emerging economies spanning the period 1960–2013 to explore whether such convergence exists and whether the increase of international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) flows has been a global or club phenomenon. We find the absence of a homogeneous convergence club. The results for FDI outflows also reach similar conclusions, suggesting the formation of convergence clubs by stage of development. These results suggest that policies that promote convergence in trade openness and FDI flows would permit countries to benefit from mutual interactions and by greater consistency and efficiency in trade regimes, thus permitting these countries to benefit from openness leading to a race to the top rather than bottom. (JEL F41, C33)     

The impact of the ACFTA on ASEAN–PRC trade: estimates based on an extended gravity model for component trade

This article uses an extended gravity model to examine the impact of the free trade agreement between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on their trade flows and patterns. New determinants are utilized to capture the growing importance of global production sharing and intraregional trade in parts and components in East Asia. We show that the free trade agreement leads to substantially higher and more pronounced bilateral trade flows between ASEAN and the PRC than what a conventional gravity model predicts and the increase is concentrated in ASEAN countries that have stronger industrial linkages with the PRC.     

Federalism, separatism and international trade

This paper explores whether countries that have a federal Constitution engage in more international trade. We identify two possible mechanisms through which political fragmentation of nation-states, namely federalism, might impact positively on trade globalization processes: domestic market fragmentation and the free trade strategy pursued by certain separatist regions in federal countries. We use a gravity equation running panel regressions to estimate the impact of federalism on trade. The Poisson estimator proposed by Santos Silva and Tenreyro (2006) is used to handle the null trade flows. We test our predictions on a large data set of 148 countries on the 1980–2002 period. After controlling for determinants of trade potentially correlated with federalism, a federalist system is found to increase international trade. We also find that separatism and linguistic fractionalization impact positively on trade openness.     

Bilateral portfolio dynamics during the global financial crisis

There has been considerable bilateral variation in the pattern of portfolio capital flows during the global financial crisis: for a given destination, investors from different countries adjusted their holdings to different degrees. We show that the size of the initial bilateral holding, geographical distance, common language, the level of trade and common institutional linkages help to explain the pattern of adjustment. These bilateral factors are more important for equities than for bonds and for investors from developing countries than for investors from advanced countries.     

Spillovers to low-income countries: importance of systemic emerging markets

This article documents the expanding economic linkages between low-income countries (LICs) and a narrow group of ‘Emerging Market (EM) leaders’ that have become major players in international trade and financial flows. VAR models show that these linkages have increased the share of growth volatility that can be attributed to foreign shocks in LICs. Dynamic panel models further analyse the impact of LIC trade orientation and production structure on the sensitivity to foreign shocks. The empirical results demonstrate that the elasticity of growth to trading partners’ growth is high for LICs in three out of the five regions: Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia. However, for commodity-exporting LICs in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, terms of trade shocks and demand from the EM leaders are the main channels of transmission of foreign shocks     

Impact of exchange rate uncertainty on commodity trade between US and Sweden

Previous studies that investigated the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the trade flows of Sweden employed aggregate trade data either between Sweden and the rest of the world or at bilateral level between Sweden and her major trading partners. In this article, we disaggregate the trade data and employ the import and export data from 87 industries that trade between Sweden and the US. We find that exchange rate volatility has significant short-run effects on the trade flows between the two countries in almost two-third of the industries. However, the short-run effects are translated into the long-run effects in one-third of the cases. Furthermore, the real depreciation of krona against the dollar was found to have favourable effects on the overall trade balance between the two countries.     

Can country trade flows benefit from improved corporate social responsibility ratings?

We set out in this study to examine the effects of country ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) ratings on the international trade flows of 28 countries. Drawing on categorization theory, we examine whether country CSR engagement is a categorizing factor capable of influencing the overall process of categorization. Based upon a two-stage approach, comprising of gravity and panel Tobit models, we find that a country's CSR rating has significantly positive effects on the country's international trade flows. When the CSR rating of a country is higher than that of another rival trading country, this will have significantly positive effects on the bilateral trade flows between the two countries.     

Asymmetric effect of exchange rate volatility on India's cross‐border trade: Evidence from global financial crisis and multiple threshold nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model

This paper examines the asymmetric effect of exchange rate volatility on India's cross‐border trade with its major trading partners: Japan, Germany, the United States, and China. We extend previous studies in two ways. First, we examine whether global financial crisis changes the asymmetric effect of exchange rate volatility on India's cross‐border trade. Next, we divide exchange rate volatility into quintiles and examine the effect of each quintile on cross‐border trade by using the multiple threshold nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (MTNARDL) model. Our findings from standard nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) indicate that the asymmetric relationship between exchange rate volatility and cross‐border trade changes as a result of global financial crisis. In addition, findings from MTNARDL indicate that in short‐run, exchange rate volatility symmetrically affects India's cross‐border trade with all sample countries whereas in long‐run it asymmetrically affects cross‐border trade. Overall, these findings are very important for policy implications and open a new dimension to exchange rate volatility and trade flows.     

Commodity trade between Pakistan and the US: is there evidence of the J-curve?

A few studies that have attempted to estimate the short-run (J-curve) and long-run impact of exchange rate depreciation on Pakistan’s trade balance are either based on aggregate trade data between Pakistan and the rest of the world or between Pakistan and her bilateral trading partners. The findings are mixed at best. Considering the trade balance between Pakistan and the US, as one of its major partners, no significant effects have been discovered. Suspecting that the trade flows between the two countries could suffer from another aggregation bias, we disaggregate their trade flows by commodity and consider the trade balance of 45 industries that trade between the two countries. We find significant short-run effects of currency depreciation on the trade balance of 17 industries. The short-run effects last into the long run in 15 cases. The largest industry that account for more than 10% of the trade seems to benefit from real depreciation in the long run.     

Trade shocks from BRIC to South Africa: A global VAR analysis

This paper studies the trade linkages between South Africa and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. We apply a global vector autoregressive model (global VAR) to investigate the degree of trade linkages and shock transmission between South Africa and the BRIC countries over the period 1995Q1–2009Q4. The model contains 32 countries and has two different estimations: the first one consists of 24 countries and one region, with the 8 countries in the euro area treated as a single economy; and the second estimation contains 20 countries and two regions, with the BRIC and the euro area countries respectively treated as a single economy. The results suggest that trade linkages exist between our focus economies; however the magnitude differs between countries. Shocks from each BRIC country are shown to have considerable impact on South African real imports and output.     

The effects of currency fluctuations and trade integration on industry trade between Canada and Mexico

Since studies of North American trade flows tend to focus on the United States as the main trading partner, trade between Canada and Mexico has received relatively little attention. Here, we examine bilateral trade flows for 62 Canadian export industries to Mexico and 45 import industries from Mexico to assess the effects of currency fluctuations and trade integration on these individual trade flows. We find that Mexico’s largest export industries respond to depreciation more than Canada’s largest export industries do. Both countries’ trade flows are influenced even more by trade integration. Since there is evidence of strong intra-industry trade between these two countries, we can attribute this effect to the exploitation of economies of scale.     

The water footprints of Morocco and the Netherlands: Global water use as a result of domestic consumption of agricultural commodities

The volume of international trade in agricultural commodities is increasing faster than the global volume of production, which is an indicator of growing international dependencies in the area of food supply. Although less obvious, it also implies growing international dependencies in the field of water supply. By importing food, countries also import water in virtual form. The aim of the paper is to assess the water footprints of Morocco, a semi-arid/arid country, and the Netherlands, a humid country. The water footprint of a country is defined as the volume of water used for the production of the goods and services consumed by the inhabitants of the country. The internal water footprint is the volume of water used from domestic water resources; the external water footprint is the volume of water used in other countries to produce goods and services imported and consumed by the inhabitants of the country. The study shows that both Morocco and the Netherlands import more water in virtual form (in the form of water-intensive agricultural commodities) than they export, which makes them dependent on water resources elsewhere in the world. The water footprint calculations show that Morocco depends for 14% on water resources outside its own borders, while the Netherlands depend on foreign water resources for 95%. It is shown that international trade can result in global water saving when a water-intensive commodity is traded from an area where it is produced with high water productivity to an area with lower water productivity. If Morocco had to domestically produce the products that are now imported from the Netherlands, it would require 780 million m³/year. However, the imported products from the Netherlands were actually produced with only 140 million m³/year, which implies a global water saving of 640 million m³/year.     

Does international openness affect the productivity of local firms?

This paper examines how international openness can change firm productivity in south‐eastern Europe (SEE), a crucial question for middle‐income countries. Using firm‐level data for six transition economies over the 1995–2002 period, we identify whether foreign ownership and propensity to trade with more advanced countries can bring about higher learning effects. We find that: (i) foreign ownership has helped restructure and enhance the productivity of local firms in four out of six countries; (ii) exporting to advanced markets has a larger impact on productivity growth in four countries, especially when the firm's absorptive capacity is taken into account; (iii) in contrast, exporting to the less competitive markets of the former Yugoslavia seems to negatively affect productivity growth in three countries; and (iv) learning effects from importing are similar to those from exporting. Our results suggest that trade liberalization is not uniformly beneficial. Regional composition of trade flows and absorptive capacity of local firms matter. Thus, trade liberalization within the SEE region may not provide a substitute for a general trade liberalization which includes access to the more competitive markets of countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development.     

Global trade flows and economic policy uncertainty

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the impacts of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on global trade flows in gauging international trade developments. We employ a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) trade model, augmented with value-added bilateral trade linkages, that allows for quantifying the effects of economy-specific uncertainty shocks on exports and imports of individual economies. We find substantial spatial propagation in the temporal dynamics of international transmission of shocks amidst the manifestations of cross-border global value chains (GVCs) with China’s accession into the WTO. We provide evidence for the significance of EPU of China and the United States, particularly the latter, in influencing global trade flows. Our results show that while the US impacts can largely be attributed to its indirect trade linkages with other economies, the impacts of China can be relegated more to its direct GVC linkages. The findings have implications on trade protectionist inclinations of the current-term US government and the ongoing efforts of China’s policymakers in steering macroeconomic rebalancing for sustainable growth.