Common markets and trade liberalization

Abstract.  The GATT Rounds show that trade liberalization is essentially a cooperative non‐stationary dynamic process. Therefore, the impact of Regionalism on trade liberalization possibly changes over time. I adapt the trade liberalization model of Devereux (1997) to examine how this impact varies. Common markets lead to a one‐time shock in immediate tariffs, as well as to a change in their rate of decline. I find that common markets that happen late in the trade liberalization process are more likely to lead to a decline in immediate tariffs. Common markets also increase the rate of decline of tariffs after their formation. JEL Classification: F03, F15     

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.     

Productivity and Firms’ Sales Destination: Chinese Characteristics

In the trade literature, it is often assumed that there is little or no trade cost within a country's borders, but large trade costs across a country's borders. Thus, productive firms self‐select into exporters and the less productive firms can only serve domestic consumers. This paper presents a similar but different case in China, whose domestic markets are segmented by provincial borders mainly owing to the various (hidden) protective measures favoring local firms. These discriminative measures are de facto trade barriers. It applies the heterogeneous trade theory to examine the effects of firms’ productivity on their sales choices in both the international and domestic markets, in the presence of intra‐national and international trade costs. We find that productive firms not only self‐select into exporters, but also into sales in other provincial markets. This pattern is sensitive to firms’ locations and ownerships. For foreign direct investment (FDI)‐controlled firms, increases in productivity are associated with a higher probability of selling into other provincial markets, rather than into international ones. Productivity increases for firms operating in the inland area exhibit different patterns than those in the Eastern area.     

Aid for trade and the quality of exports

This article studies how aid for trade (AfT) affects the quality of recipient countries’ exports. It shows that the quality effect is most discernible for AfT for assistance in trade policy: a 50% increase in the value of AfT received in this category is associated with a 0.5–1% increase in the quality of exports to the donor and other OECD countries. On average, the actual AfT received for assistance in trade policy leads to a 2% upgrade of the recipient country in the quality ladder of all developing countries. Around half of this quality effect is driven by the quality improvement of continued products in continued markets (intensive margin), and the other half by the quality upgrading of new products in continued markets and existing products in new markets (extensive margin).     

FDI Liberalization as a Source of Comparative Advantage in China

Two features of China's trade patterns suggest that elements beyond factor abundance explain its export performance. The high penetration in world markets of labor-intensive products has been accompanied by: (i) a high share in exports of productivity-advanced foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) and (ii) a high penetration of FIEs in labor-intensive sectors. We show that FDI liberalization endogenously introduces Ricardian features to an otherwise standard endowment-based trade model, strengthening China's natural comparative advantage in labor-intensive products. We discuss how capital accumulation, productivity growth, rural–urban migration, incentives for foreign investment, and distortions in financial markets affect this bias.     

Evolutionary choice of markets

We consider an economy where a finite set of agents can trade on one of two asset markets. Due to endogenous participation the markets may differ in the liquidity they provide. Traders have idiosyncratic preferences for the markets, e.g.due to differential time preferences for maturity dates of futures contracts. For a broad range of parameters we find that no trade, trade on both markets (individualization) as well as trade on one market only (standardization) is supported by a Nash equilibrium. By contrast, whenever the number of traders becomes large, the evolutionary process selects a unique stochastically stable state which corresponds to the equilibrium with two active markets and coincides with the welfare maximizing market structure. We are grateful to Thorsten Hens, Fernando Vega-Redondo and a referee for valuable comments. We also thank seminar participants at the University of Zurich, the CES research seminar at the University of Munich, the Koc University in Istanbul as well as conference participants at the SAET conference in Ischia, the ESEM in Lausanne and the ESF workshop on Behavioural Models in Economics and Finance in Vienna. A first version of the paper was written while Marc Oliver Bettzüge was visiting the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich. Financial Support by the Swiss Banking Institute and by the National Centre of Competence in Research “Financial Valuation and Risk Management” (NCCR FINRISK) is gratefully acknowledged. The NCCR FINRISK is a research program supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.     

Structural change and international competitiveness in Canada: an alternative approach

The neoclassical theory of international trade says little of relevance about the dramatic shifts in world trade patterns in the postwar period. Much of the weakness of the Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson model has been attributed to its assumption of globally uniform technology and thus the instantaneous international diffusion of technological innovation. In this paper we relax these assumptions, focusing instead on the role of innovation in the determination of international trade flows. We develop a disaggregated, dynamic Ricardian trade model (based on Pasinetti's 1981 growth model), in which the sectoral rate of process innovation is important in relation to the average innovation rate in the economy. The level of this ratio compared to that of foreign rivals drives long-run trends in international competitiveness. This is called the Pasinetti Trade Hypothesis (PTH). Ricardian comparative cost considerations form the logical foundation for the PTH in that they establish the conditions under which dynamic considerations are relevant. The model is tested for the case of Canada, during the period 1961–72, with the USA serving as a proxy for Canada's international competition. The rate of process innovation in a sector is measured as the rate of change in the vertically integrated labour coefficient in that sector. The results support the PTH in its pure and modified form and provide much weaker support for the static Ricardian hypothesis, indicating that in a world in which more than one country exports each good, the dynamics of structural change - process innovation - may be as important as static comparative cost considerations as a determinant of a sector's international competitiveness. The focus on international differences in technology and innovation rates gives support to government policies aimed at boosting sectoral innovation in relation to foreign rivals. At the least, a laissez-faire response to such ‘industrial tinkering’ by foreign competition may be extremely costly.     

Exploring policy options in joint intertemporal-spatial trade models using an incomplete markets approach

In this paper we discuss the desirability of service trade liberlization in the presence of incompleteness of markets where there is both inter-spatial and intertemporal trade between countries. We use numerical simulation methods for insights and relate our discussion to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in the WTO. We interpret the absence of intertemporal trade as an absence of intermediation services provided by both domestic and foreign service providers. For simplicity, we consider extreme cases where intertemporal intermediation services can only be provided by domestic providers, so that when intertemporal trade in services is not allowed, markets are not complete. To our knowledge, this type of models is not used in the trade literature as general comparative statics results are unavailable. We first consider the liberalization of trade in financial services in an inter-spatial and intertemporal model of two countries, and we show how services liberalization can be welfare worsening in the presence of a tariff on spatial trade in goods. We show that this can hold in an artificial world with no domestic financial services provider. We compare financial service trade autarky in which there is no intermediation to financial service trade liberalization which involves costless intertemporal intermediation provided by foreign service providers. We also consider a more complex (and realistic) world where costly intermediation services can be provided by both domestic and foreign providers. This paper draws in part on material of an earlier paper, “Financial Services Trade Liberalization in A Joint Spatial Intertemporal Multi-Country Model” by Huang et al. (2004). We acknowledge the financial support from The Centre for Intentional Governance Innovation (CIGI), Waterloo, Canada and from National Social Science Foundation of China (SSFC Grant 07AJL002), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC Grant 70825003) and “Humanities and Social Science” Major Project, Chinese Ministry of Education (Grant Number 07JJD790145).     

Evidence for Financial Contagion in Endogenous Volatile Periods

The objective of this study is to analyze cross‐border contagious dynamics in both foreign exchange markets and stock exchange markets. Propagation is analyzed with respect to the transmission of excessive volatility that is endogenously determined. The contagion process is discussed in the context of financial systems, foreign direct investments and trade. Implementing a vector autoregressive‐multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (VAR‐MGARCH) model, we show that country‐specific turbulence in financial markets is able to create unanticipated financial contagion across countries. Diversified trade and financial relations decrease the risk of exposure to contagion from external markets. The world's largest economies, however, play a price‐setter role, and diversification is of secondary importance. Asymmetric transmission of the empirically predicted contagion prevails in the latter case.     

Labour unions and multi‐product firms in closed and open economies

Abstract This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with multi‐product firms and union wage setting. In this model, we conduct two policy experiments. First, we show that deunionization induces a general decline in firm scale and scope, the respective reduction being more pronounced in non‐unionized industries. Second, we study the consequences of trade liberalization, and show that access to foreign markets lowers firm scope in all industries as well as the scope differential between unionized and non‐unionized firms. Adjustments in firm scale turn out to be less clear‐cut and, inter alia, depend on the degree of product differentiation.     

Market Size, Trade, and Productivity

We develop a monopolistically competitive model of trade with firm heterogeneity—in terms of productivity differences—and endogenous differences in the "toughness" of competition across markets—in terms of the number and average productivity of competing firms. We analyse how these features vary across markets of different size that are not perfectly integrated through trade; we then study the effects of different trade liberalization policies. In our model, market size and trade affect the toughness of competition, which then feeds back into the selection of heterogeneous producers and exporters in that market. Aggregate productivity and average mark-ups thus respond to both the size of a market and the extent of its integration through trade (larger, more integrated markets exhibit higher productivity and lower mark-ups). Our model remains highly tractable, even when extended to a general framework with multiple asymmetric countries integrated to different extents through asymmetric trade costs. We believe this provides a useful modelling framework that is particularly well suited to the analysis of trade and regional integration policy scenarios in an environment with heterogeneous firms and endogenous mark-ups.     

Inflation and Unemployment in General Equilibrium*

When labor is indivisible, there exist efficient outcomes with some agents randomly unemployed, as in Rogerson (1988) . We integrate this idea into the modern theory of monetary exchange, where some trade occurs in centralized markets and some in decentralized markets, as in Lagos and Wright (2005) . This delivers a general equilibrium model of unemployment and money, with explicit microeconomic foundations. We show that the implied relation between inflation and unemployment can be positive or negative, depending on simple preference conditions. Our Phillips curve provides a long‐run, exploitable, trade‐off for monetary policy; it turns out, however, that the optimal policy is the Friedman rule.     

Search cost,trading strategies and optimal market structure

The theory of Walrasian equilibrium yields a set of prices at which the aggregate competitive demand for each commodity equals its aggregate competitive supply. However, even at equilibrium prices the theory of competitive equilibrium does not explicitly offer explanation regarding the manner in which trades are actually executed. This paper considers a model where trade takes place in a decentralized fashion and examines in a dynamic game-theoretic framework, the role of social institution of money and markets in facilitating exchange. The steady state Nash equilibrium derived in the paper demonstrates how, depending on the level of transaction costs associated with a market setup (synonymously, trading posts to exchange possible pairs of goods) appropriate monetary trade emerges, which like a hub and spoke network (Starr and Stinchcombe, 1999) makes some markets non-functioning and in equilibrium only the markets having trade through the medium of exchange continue to exist. However, despite the obvious advantages of a market setup in reducing search costs, pure random search for a complementary trading partner (as considered by Ostroy and Starr, 1974; Kiyotaki and Wright , 1989; and others) prevails in many economies, especially, in many developing economies. This paper models this feature of developing economies by introducing differences in transaction costs across agents and shows why sustainable equilibria might exist exhibiting random search for certain commodities even in the presence of established markets.     

Quality of Labor Markets in a Developing Country

This study is an application of Yano's market quality economics to trade. It considers the quality of labor markets in a developing country and sheds light on an important role of the voting mechanism in the process of which the quality of labor markets is endogenously determined. Assuming the majority vote, it is demonstrated that if the timing of voting is wrong, a developing country misses high‐quality labor markets although trade provides an opportunity for it to reach such markets.     

Learning to Export and the Timing of Entry to Export Markets

Exporters normally enter their first foreign markets some time after beginning to sell locally, then enter subsequent markets progressively. Standard trade models are essentially static and do not explain these elementary facts about exporting, which can bias the estimation of trade patterns. This paper proposes a model that endogenously generates the timing of entry to new export markets. The timing results from a learning mechanism. More productive firms are less sensitive to the learning effect and therefore (1) enter markets more quickly and (2) enter larger markets earlier and smaller markets later. These predictions are confirmed using Swedish firm‐level data.     

PROFIT SHIFTING AND TRADE AGREEMENTS IN IMPERFECTLY COMPETITIVE MARKETS*

Do new rationales for trade agreements arise once imperfectly competitive markets are allowed? We consider several trade models that feature imperfectly competitive markets and argue that the basic rationale for a trade agreement is, in fact, the same rationale that arises in perfectly competitive markets. In all of the models that we consider, and whether or not governments have political–economic objectives, the only rationale for a trade agreement is to remedy the inefficient terms‐of‐trade‐driven restrictions in trade volume. We also show that the principles of reciprocity and nondiscrimination continue to be efficiency enhancing in these settings.     

Trade Marks and Performance in Services and Manufacturing Firms: Evidence of Schumpeterian Competition through Innovation

We develop Lancaster's model of consumer behaviour under product differentiation to analyse Schumpeterian creative destruction. Launching new products with novel characteristics enables firms to temporarily steal market share from rivals. Product launch is monitored by using trade marks, patents and research and development. The dataset covers a large sample of UK service and manufacturing firms. We find that stock market value is positively associated with own trade mark activity and trade mark‐active firms achieve significantly higher value‐added. Greater trade mark activity by competitors reduces net output of firms, but raises their stock market value. This is consistent with the Schumpeterian process of competition through innovation.     

International Risk Sharing and the Transmission of Productivity Shocks

This paper shows that standard international business cycle models can be reconciled with the empirical evidence on the lack of consumption risk sharing. First, we show analytically that with incomplete asset markets productivity disturbances can have large uninsurable effects on wealth, depending on the value of the trade elasticity and shock persistence. Second, we investigate these findings quantitatively in a model calibrated to the U.S. economy. With the low trade elasticity estimated via a method of moments procedure, the consumption risk of productivity shocks is magnified by high terms of trade and real exchange rate (RER) volatility. Strong wealth effects in response to shocks raise the demand for domestic goods above supply, crowding out external demand and appreciating the terms of trade and the RER. Building upon the literature on incomplete markets, we then show that similar results are obtained when productivity shocks are nearly permanent, provided the trade elasticity is set equal to the high values consistent with micro-estimates. Under both approaches the model accounts for the low and negative correlation between the RER and relative (domestic to foreign) consumption in the data—the "Backus–Smith puzzle".     

Stock market interdependence between Australia and its trading partners: does trade intensity matter?

We investigate the extent and manner of stock market interdependence between Australia and its trading partners and examine whether this is affected by trade intensity. Based on trade intensity, we classify Australia’s trading partners into major, medium and minor partners. We hypothesize that markets with greater (lower) trade intensity will be more (less) interdependent with Australia. We perform correlation (unconditional and conditional) analyses between Australia and its trading partners. Our results indicate that most of the markets that are highly correlated with Australia are its major trading partners. We conduct panel regression analysis to investigate whether trade intensity has any impact on the stock market correlations between Australia and its trading partners. The results show that trade intensity significantly and positively affect the correlations of Australia with its major trading partners. Thus, the results confirm our hypothesis that trade intensity drives stock market interdependence between Australia and its trading partners.     

Do regional trade agreements stimulate FDI? Evidence for the Agadir,MERCOSUR and AFTA regions

The integration of emerging markets into the global economy is heavily promoted by foreign direct investment (FDI ) inflows. Among the factors explaining the location of FDI , regional trade agreements (RTA s) can be relevant for emerging markets, as they can promote economic integration and increase the attractiveness of the region for foreign investors. This paper investigates the impact of South–South trade agreements on the FDI decision of multinationals, where the Agadir, mercado comun del sur (MERCOSUR), and ASEAN free trade area (AFTA) agreements are considered. Three panels of countries are defined, where the members joined a specific agreement or not. Non‐Gulf Arab states are compared to better performing regions in Latin America and Southern and Eastern Asia. The analysis provides evidence that openness to foreign trade and financial markets are among the main catalysts to attract FDI , provided that business‐friendly institutions exist in the host country. Other variables, like the size of the industrial sector, urbanization rates, and external debt appear to be important in some cases. The integration of China into the world economy is a specific trigger for FDI to Asian destinations. Since RTA s influence the market size by reducing barriers to trade, their impact operates via GDP growth and openness. Gains from the agreement are striking for Latin America and Asia, but not for Arab states. To attract more FDI , business‐friendly institutional reforms and mechanisms to support new firm foundation should be implemented in this region.