Industrial Structure and Australia– UK Intra-Industry Trade

This paper tests industry-specific hypotheses of the determinants of intra-industry trade in the context of Australia-UK trade. In doing so it separates intra-industry trade (ITT) into ITT in horizontally differentiated products and ITT in vertically differentiated products. It finds that the latter is the dominant former of ITT. Further the paper investigates the robustness of empirical results on testing industry-specific hypotheses to the choice of national (UK or Australian) industrial structure characteristics. The assumption of uniform industrial structures across countries adopted in other studies is shown not to be justified.