Trade volume and economic growth in the MENA region: Goods or services?

This paper explores the macroeconomic and sectoral effects of goods and service trade on the economic performance of MENA countries for the period 1960–2011. While the MENA region has been widely neglected in the trade and growth literature, this paper offers a decomposition of MENA GDP growth in order to disentangle the contributions of both service and goods trade. The results show a positive association between real GDP and both service and goods trade. The interaction term between trade in goods and trade in services is negative, suggesting that as goods trade increases, the marginal effect of service trade on real GDP decreases. However, the overall effect of service trade on real GDP is positive. The decomposition of GDP growth reveals a greater impact of goods trade, although service trade is important, and for most countries greater than the effect of tertiary enrolment.     

The Impact of Liberalizing Trade in Services on Trade in Goods: An Empirical Investigation

In this paper we use a large dataset to explore whether the liberalization of trade in services is beneficial for the international trade in goods. We find empirical evidence supporting this notion. We investigate which types of trade in services are more important for the international trade in goods and find that trade in transportation and communication services generate the largest impacts on trade in goods. We also investigate which types of trade in goods are likely to benefit from the liberalization of trade in services and find that, under the 2‐digit ISTC classification, all the categories are likely to exhibit a positive impact.     

Changing trade patterns in major OECD countries

Disaggregated trade data are used to examine changing trade patterns for five developed economic regions: the USA, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Japan. This study covers the 1980–1997 time period, during which international trade for most goods faced less border protection. Changing trade patterns are found for the USA, Japan, and the EU, while persistent trade patterns are observed for Australia and Canada. Classifying goods into four groups, trade patterns found in manufactured goods were the most dynamic, and trade in bulk agricultural goods the most persistent.     

The Effects of Trade Liberalization in a Vertical Structure

Despite the importance of international trade on intermediate goods, the literature did not pay much attention to this aspect in determining the effects of trade liberalization in the presence of a labor union. We take up this issue here and show the effects of trade liberalization on the final goods and/or the intermediate goods, where the domestic firm pays unionized wage and imports intermediate goods. We show that trade liberalization on the intermediate goods (final goods) increases (decreases) the unionized wage, labor union's utility and domestic profit. Trade liberalization on both the final goods and intermediate goods may either increase or decrease the domestic unionized wage, labor union's utility and domestic profit depending on the input coefficients and the initial tariff levels. Our qualitative results are robust with respect to the intermediate goods market structure, the pricing strategy of the intermediate goods producers and the union's objective function.     

服务贸易壁垒与货物贸易壁垒的比较

20世纪90年代以来,服务业已成为全球经济增长最快的部门,全球经济竞争的重点正从货物贸易转向服务贸易。近年货物贸易频频遭遇的技术壁垒已经成了我国发展国际贸易的瓶颈,分析货物贸易壁垒与服务贸易壁垒的规律、异同和应对其的成本和措施,对制定国家贸易战略有着重要的现实意义。     

International Provision of Trade Services, Trade, and Fragmentation

This paper examines the special role that trade liberalization in service industries can play in stimulating not only trade in services but also in goods. International trade in goods requires inputs from several services industries (trade services, such as transportation, insurance, and finance) in order to complete and facilitate international transactions. Restriction on the ability of national service providers to provide these services across borders and within foreign countries creates additional costs and barriers to international trade above those that would arise in otherwise comparable intranational exchange. As a result, trade liberalization in services can yield benefits, by facilitating trade in goods, that are larger than one might expect from analysis of the services trade alone. This paper explores this idea using simple theoretical models to specify the relationships between services trade and goods trade. The paper also notes the role of services trade in a model of international industrial fragmentation, where production processes can be separated across locations but at some cost in terms of additional service inputs. The incentives for such fragmentation can be larger across countries than within countries, owing to the greater differences in factor prices and technologies available. However, the service costs of international fragmentation can also be larger, especially if regulations and restrictions impede the international provision of services. As a result, trade liberalization in services can also stimulate fragmentation of production of both goods and services, thus increasing international trade and the gains from trade even further.     

国际贸易结构分析:贸易品的技术分布

对国际贸易结构的理论与经验研究已经充分揭示了技术在贸易中的重要作用。但是,对于如何识别贸易品的技术差异,如何分析贸易品的技术分布状况,进而如何从技术分布来分析贸易结构等,目前还没有非常成熟的方法。本文试图通过完善关志雄(2002)在这方面的努力来提供基于贸易品技术分布的贸易结构分析法。本文用显示技术附加值赋值原理作为识别贸易品技术附加值高低的理论基础,然后根据这一原理提供了具体的赋值方法,并提出了四种基于贸易品技术分布的贸易结构分析方法,分别是:竞争互补指数、竞争压力指数、技术高度曲线和贸易品高低技术分类分析法。最后,本文用上述方法分析了中国的对外贸易结构。     

Real exchange rates,asset prices and terms of trade: A theoretical analysis

This paper develops a continuous-time two-country dynamic equilibrium model, in which the real exchange rates, asset prices, and terms of trade are jointly determined in the presence of nontradable goods. The model determines the relation between the financial markets and real goods markets in the world economy and their responses to various shocks under the home bias assumption. A positive domestic supply shock induces a positive return on the domestic asset markets and a deterioration of terms of trade that improves the foreign output and boosts the foreign asset markets. Demand shocks act in the opposite way. This model also analyses the impact of change in the relative price of nontradable to tradable goods on the terms of trade and asset markets. A higher productivity growth in tradable goods than in nontradable goods leads to a higher relative price of nontradable to tradable goods, which appreciates the real exchange rate, deteriorates the terms of trade, and depresses the domestic and foreign asset markets. A lower relative price of nontradable goods depreciates the real exchange rate, improves the terms of trade, and lifts both the domestic and foreign asset markets.     

Should Small Countries Fear Deindustrialization?

Will small countries deindustrialize when opening up to trade with large countries? Donald Davis (1998 ) shows that for the home market effect to lead to deindustrialization of small countries, trade costs for homogeneous goods must be sufficiently smaller than trade costs in differentiated goods, a condition which is not supported by empirical evidence. We show that if differentiated goods production uses tradable inputs small countries can become deindustrialized when trading with a sufficiently large country and if trade costs are low.     

Market entry and trade weighted import costs

Trade weighting is a common method of aggregating trade frictions. It will understate changes in these costs when there are non‐ad valorem trade costs and quality differences. Newly traded goods enter at higher trade costs than previously traded ones. Lower import costs shift trade to low‐quality goods with higher measured trade costs. These effects are quantitatively important. U.S. import costs fall more than twice as fast as trade weighted measures from 1974 to 2004 after the impact of shifting quality and newly traded goods is accounted for. Empirical estimates that use trade weighting will underestimate the welfare impact of trade costs.     

Export and import composition as determinants of bilateral trade in goods: evidence from Russia

Conventional theory and several empirical studies state that incomes and exchange rates are the key determinants of the trade balance. Here, we argue that export and import composition are also key explanatory variables because some goods are inelastic and/or with a high added value, directly and indirectly affecting income and price elasticities and trade balance. Thus, if exports and/or imports significantly consist of price inelastic products, then, a positive and a negative effect, respectively, should be expected on the trade balance. Using bilateral trade data and dynamic panel models, we found that the ratio of exports of crude petroleum and natural gas (price inelastic goods) to total exports is significantly and positively associated with the Russian trade balance in goods. For its part, Russian imports of high-tech goods (income elastic and price inelastic with a high added value) show a negative association. The goods balance of Russia also responded to changes in relative income, but there is only weak evidence of reactions to changes in the exchange rate. These findings partially explain the persistent surplus in the Russian trade balance and current account.     

中国服务贸易与货物贸易因果关系分析——基于误差修正模型的中美对比分析

运用时间序列分析和因果关系分析,对比分析中美两国各自货物贸易和服务贸易之间的延迟引导关系。协整分析和格兰杰因果关系检验结果明确了中国实现服务贸易与货物贸易可持续发展的内生性难题:中国服务出口的增长最终促进同时期货物出口的增长,与美国服务出口的增长最终促进同时期服务出口的增长这一内在动力差别较大。     

HOW MUCH DOES GEOGRAPHY DEFLECT SERVICES TRADE? CANADIAN ANSWERS

We estimate geographic barriers to trade in nine service categories for Canada's provinces from 1997 to 2007 with novel high‐quality bilateral provincial trade data. The border directly reduces average provincial trade with the United States relative to interprovincial trade to 2.4% of its borderless level. Incorporating multilateral resistance reduces foreign trade relative to interprovincial to 0.1% of its frictionless potential. Geography reduces services trade some seven times more than goods trade overall. Surprisingly, intraprovincial (local) trade in services and goods is equally deflected upward, implying that the border increases interprovincial trade much more in services than goods.     

Intraindustry trade in intermediate goods

Since intermediate goods play such a vital role in foreign trade, this paper develops a model that explains the benefits from intraindustry trade in differentiated intermediate goods. In comparison with a situation of autarchy, this type of trade causes an increase in the number of intermediate good varieties. In this way, the producers of final goods will benefit from intermediate good varieties, which are closer to the ideal for a specific production process. At the same time, the producers of intermediate goods will, under conditions of international division of labor, benefit from economies of scale.     

Goods market responses to trade shocks and trade and wages decompositions

Abstract.  Trade and wages literature asks whether trade or technology has been the major factor behind increases in wage inequality in OECD countries since the 1980s. In this literature, little attention has been paid to how goods market responses to trade shocks affect conclusions. Using an Armington heterogeneous goods trade model we capture demand side effects, and show how trade shocks affecting the price of unskilled‐intensive importable goods can be absorbed on the demand side of goods markets, with little or no impact on relative wage rates. No wage impact occurs if the elasticity of substitution in preferences between imports and import substitutes is one. As this elasticity increases, trade plays an ever larger role in explaining wage inequality changes, and as the elasticity goes below one the sign of the effect changes. We present some results of general equilibrium decompositions of total wage change into trade and technology components using UK data. We suggest that since many import demand elasticity estimates are in the neighbourhood of one, there is a prima facie case that goods market considerations further lower the significance of trade as an explanation of recent trends in OECD wage inequality beyond that claimed in the literature.     

CONTRACT ENFORCEMENT AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE

This paper derives estimating equations from a model where individuals consume two classes of goods, and the degree of contract enforcement affects the transaction cost of trade in the two classes of goods differentially. Empirically, using Rauch's classification, internationally traded goods are classified into differentiated goods and those possessing a reference price, with the presumption that contract enforcement issues are more important for the former. It is verified that the measures of contract enforcement affect the volume of trade in both types of goods, but the impact is larger for differentiated goods.     

MIDDLEMEN AND THE ADVERSE SELECTION PROBLEM

We demonstrate that the coexistence of an uncoordinated search market and a middleman market may alleviate adverse selection in the trade of goods of different quality. Inability to conduct trade penalizes sellers of low‐quality goods disproportionately, encouraging them to trade via middlemen. A semi‐separating equilibrium exists when a sufficient number of sellers of low‐quality goods choose the middleman market to allow high‐quality goods to be successfully traded in the search market. The result may explain why a search market can survive alongside a coordinated market, a phenomenon characteristic, for example, of markets for used cars, housing and labour.     

“十二五”时期我国对外贸易的转变

"十二五"规划实施时期,国际国内的新形势对我国对外贸易提出了新的要求。为了实现协调和持续发展,对外贸易必须实现一系列的转变:由注重出口规模增长转向进出口并重;由以发达国家为主要贸易对象转向贸易对象的多元化;由以货物贸易为主转向货物贸易和服务贸易并重;由单一地打破贸易保护转变为通过多种方式减少贸易摩擦。     

Trade policy in a Ricardian model with a continuum of goods under nonhomothetic preferences

We study the effects of trade liberalization in a Ricardian trade model with a continuum of goods and nonhomothetic preferences. Goods are ordered according to priority, and higher-ranked goods are consumed only by richer households. South (North) has a comparative advantage in the lower- (higher-) ranked goods. South's terms-of-trade unambiguously deteriorate as a result of unilaterally reducing its tariffs. North, by contrast, may experience a terms-of-trade gain when liberalizing its trade. It appears that the redistribution of tariff revenue from rich to poor households within each country increases the burden of trade liberalization for poor households.     

贸易自由化是如何影响我国出口产品质量的？*--基于贸易政策不确定性下降的视角

传统理论认为贸易自由化会促进出口产品的质量升级,但我国加入W TO后的情况却并非如此。文章基于贸易政策不确定性的视角,利用我国加入W TO前后美国对我国产品进行关税调整这一自然实验,通过倍差法分析了贸易自由化对我国出口产品质量的影响。研究表明：（1）在贸易自由化的过程中,贸易政策不确定性的下降会拉低我国的出口产品质量,且这一结论在改变质量测度方法、控制成本效应以及使用不同的产品属性、贸易对象和样本的情况下依然稳健;（2）贸易政策不确定性主要是通过广延边际上的质量调整降低了我国出口产品的总体质量,即在贸易政策不确定性下降幅度越大的产品中,有越多的生产低质量产品的企业进入出口市场;（3）在集约边际上,存续企业并未针对贸易政策不确定性的下降做出及时的产品质量调整,从而无法改变我国的产品质量在短期内下降的趋势。文章为我国如何在推行贸易自由化的同时实现出口产品质量升级提供了启示。