Estimation of the East African Community's trade benefits from promoting intra‐regional trade

In the literature on economic integration, the optimum currency area (OCA) theory says that there should be a high degree of trade between potential members of a monetary union for them to benefit from the use of a single currency. This study uses an augmented gravity model of trade to estimate the East African Community's (EAC) trade effects, as this community decided to participate in a monetary union by 2024. The study uses the fixed effect filter (FEF) estimator, which follows a two‐step approach and outperforms the standard fixed effects (FE) estimator. The results indicate that EAC has the potential to increase trade among partner states by 122% more than expected from the normal trade levels. The study, therefore, supports the ongoing East African Monetary Union process. However, to improve the likelihood of creating a more sustainable monetary union, the study recommends these countries to primarily focus on the full implementation of the customs union and common market steps. The main contribution of this study is that it provides robust estimates of the EAC's effects on intra‐regional trade using more recent data and updated econometric techniques.     

Intra- and Inter-industry Externalities from Foreign Direct Investment in the Mexican Manufacturing Sector: New Evidence from Mexican Regions

This paper presents new empirical evidence on externalities from Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in several Mexican regions in the early 1990s. The main findings are threefold. First, the presence of FDI creates negative externalities within industries and positive externalities between industries through backward linkages. Second, FDI-externalities are stimulated by large technological differences between FDI and Mexican firms and by geographic concentration of industries. Third, we identify a substantial level of regional heterogeneity of the externality impact of FDI, in line with the notion that FDI may have contributed to processes of changing regional prosperity under trade liberalization. The findings also imply that maquiladora firms in the border states are generating positive externalities.     

Monetary Union,Trade Integration,and Business Cycles in 19th Century Europe

This paper studies the impact of monetary arrangements on trade integration and business cycle correlation in late 19th century Europe. We estimate a gravity model and show that tighter monetary integration was associated with substantially higher trade, as in recent studies using contemporary data. For instance, the Austro-Hungarian monetary union improved trade between member states by a factor of 3. To explain this, we build and estimate a simple model where greater monetary integration weakens the current account constraint by fostering business cycle co-movements.     

New Borders and Trade Flows: A Gravity Model Analysis of the Baltic States

The objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the effects of an economic and political union by studying the trade flows of the three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after the breakup of the Soviet Union. We specify and estimate a gravity model of exports for the Nordic countries which enables us to determine the size and direction of trade flows in the Baltic states had they not been affected by the political institutions of the Soviet Union. Our results suggest that Baltic foreign trade was not only reduced significantly but also diverted to the members of the former Soviet Union. Consistent with our estimates, we also find that these consequences of the former political union are quickly dissipating, and the Baltic countries are increasing their share of exports to the European Union and the U.S.     

The Contribution of Exports to the Mexican Economy During the First Globalisation (1870–1929)

This article provides an assessment of the contribution of exports to the Mexican economy during the first globalisation. This implies revisiting conventional explanations based on the tradition of structuralism and dependency theory, using a new, complete set of data on Mexico's foreign trade, and evaluating the direct contribution as well as the indirect benefits provided by export activities, through mechanisms that linked foreign trade to the rest of the economy. The most important among these were positive externalities, spillovers, and backward and forward linkages.     

浅谈新时期乡镇工会党工共建工作的创新

乡镇工会是我国工会领导体制中最为基层的地方工会,处在工会工作的最前沿,直接面对基层,服务职工群众,属于承上启下的关键环节,是工会工作创新发展的基础和保证。本文现就新时期乡镇工会党工共建工作的创新,着力提升党建带工建科学化水平,作一浅显地探讨。     

浅析当前企业工会面临的问题及对策

随着制度的改革,企业工会工作出现了诸多问题,诸如:工会干部的素质跟不上企业发展的需要、协调劳动关系的要求增高和难度增大、作对象变得复杂等。本文通过对企业工会问题的分析,从提高工会干部素质、建立和健全工会制度、处理好"四个关系"等方面来改善问题、解决问题。     

International trade in used cars and problems of economic development

This paper provides a price-theoretic explanation of the well-known phenomenon that automobiles in developing countries depreciate less rapidly and are scrapped at a greater age than they are in industrial countries. This paper then argues that the renewal of barriers to free trade in used cars would lead to substantial welfare gains for developing countries through both capital gains implicit in the arbitrage and positive externalities from car repair industries. Negative externalities from increased car supplies are evaluated and the final part of this paper considers what policies might be needed to develop international trade in used cars on a large scale.     

Trade creation,trade diversion,and the general equilibrium effects of regional trade agreements: a study of the European Community–Turkey customs union

This paper presents an industry-level analysis of trade flows in order to estimate the trade effects of Turkey’s customs union with the European Community (EC). The paper is able to distinguish between trade creation and trade diversion by employing tariff data on each good to measure the impact of not only the tariff level but also the difference between tariffs applied to imports from Europe and the most-favored nation tariffs applied to imports from other non-preferential trading partners. The paper estimates the general equilibrium effects of the customs union in addition to the effects of eliminating tariffs on the EC’s exports to Turkey. It concludes that the customs union has generated more than twice as much trade creation as trade diversion but that the overall impact of the customs union has been relatively small.     

What Factors Can Explain the Rising Spatial Disparity in Economic Activities in China?

This paper explores the impact of spatial externalities in shaping China's economic geography by establishing a theoretical framework that contains regional productivity, trade barriers and local amenities to capture spatial externalities between different regions over time. Combining provincial data on bilateral trade flows with observed information about economic geography during the period 1998–2013, we estimate the distribution and marginal contribution of each explanatory factor. Empirical results suggest that regional labor density and wage are positively related to exogenous productivity and amenities, and negatively related to trade barriers. Meanwhile, variation in the marginal contribution of exogenous productivity and amenities and trade barriers reflects the regional temporal–spatial features in China's recent marketization process. Therefore, the Chinese government should place more emphasis on absorbing advanced technologies and reducing inter‐regional market barriers to promote balanced regional development and improve the efficiency of China's spatial resource allocation.     

Resistance to Trade Liberalization in Unionized Sector

This paper studies the lobbying against trade liberalization by both a firm and a union in the same industry. We find that the relationship between their political activities depends on the effect of political activity by one on the marginal effectiveness of political activity by the other. We also show that, when they are strongly risk-averse and their political activities are strategic complements, trade liberalization is likely to be successful if business is brisk, the foreign firm's production cost is high or the number of union members is small. However, when they are not strongly risk-averse, these results hold reversely.     

“俄白哈关税同盟”对中哈经贸关系的影响

2009年11月27日,俄、白、哈三国签署了《关税同盟海关法典》,标志着＂俄白哈关税同盟＂正式成立。＂俄白哈关税同盟＂作为以俄罗斯为主导的欧亚经济共同体框架内在关税同盟方面取得实质性进展的成果,而中国又是哈萨克斯坦的重要贸易伙伴,＂俄白哈关税同盟＂的建立势必对中国与其成员国的经贸关系产生影响。基于此,本文对＂关税同盟＂建立后,该同盟对中国与其成员国-哈萨克斯坦经贸关系所产生的影响进行了分析,并在此基础上提出中国应对＂俄白哈关税同盟＂的策略。     

Endogenous Symmetry of Shocks in a Monetary Union

The monetary union issue, when assessed with the traditional inferences for optimal currency areas, misses an important dimension. Increased specialisation induced by reduced transaction costs, suggested by Krugman's lessons of Massachusetts, is only a part of the story. Even if agglomeration and inter-industry trade may occur as a result of reduced transaction costs, this tendency may be counteracted by the elimination of uncertainty associated with bilateral exchange rate variability within the monetary union.Thus, in contradiction to what is generally assumed on the basis of the reduction in transaction costs only, the European Monetary Union (EMU) is likely to foster intra-industry trade in Europe, leading to more symmetric shocks between member states. The monetary union will endogenously create the conditions of its success. Empirical evidence is provided for EU countries' bilateral trade over the period 1980–1994, using disaggregated trade data.     

The Impact of Trade Integration on Business Cycle Co-Movements in Europe

This paper extends our previous research on East Asia to the case of 14 European countries from 1977 to 1999. According to our empirical results, intraindustry trade is again the major channel through which the business cycles of European countries become synchronized. This contrasts with existing studies that found that increased trade itself led to the synchronization of business cycles. Our findings have important implications for the adoption of a currency union, as we expect that the costs of joining a currency union will diminish significantly only when intraindustry trade becomes dominant. JEL no. E32, F33, F36, F41     

Asymmetric Effect of Currency Union for Developing Countries

The large effect of currency union on trade volume has been well documented by Rose (2000). However, the effect of currency union on trade balance has hardly been previously reported. In this study, the effect of currency union is found to differ substantially across imports and exports when a developing country trade with developed country that anchors the currency. To ensure that the asymmetric effect does not come from the specific nature of countries that have adopted a common currency or endogeneity of currency union, we test the same hypothesis using nominal exchange rate volatility and real exchange rate level.     

A cointegration analysis of dynamic externalities

This paper presents a cointegration analysis on the effects of dynamic externalities upon economic growth using time-series data from 1975 to 2003 on the one-digit industries of the Tokyo metropolitan area in Japan. Some new time-series econometric methods that have been recently developed to conduct unit root and cointegration tests are used in the analysis, allowing for an endogenously determined structural change in the time period studied. It also proposes a new type of dynamic externalities, called Network dynamic externalities, to represent knowledge spillovers resulting from the whole agglomerated area via transportation networks, and shows that they have cointegrated relations with the total factor productivity (TFP) of the manufacturing, finance, wholesale and retail trade, as well as the overall industries. In addition, evidence is also found that Marshall–Arrow–Romer (MAR) dynamic externalities, which are associated with own industrial production concentration, affect the TFP of most industries selected for estimation. However, Jacobs dynamic externalities, which are represented by the diversity of industrial production, only contribute to the TFP of the services industry, and Porter dynamic externalities, which are expressed by the competitiveness within industries, do not influence the selected industrial TFP.     

市场背景下中国传统工会转型的可能路径

文章通过对深圳一起罢工事件中工会部门行为的考察发现,转型期中国基层工会部门正出现新的变化：被赋予更多的组织工人和帮助工人维权的职能,并且开始发挥实质性作用。政府系统并非铁板一块,由于有作为才有地位,工会部门可能代表工人利益与体制内的其他部门博弈。在新的时期,由于产业工人的抗争和巩固一元化工会合法性等考虑,工会部门正转向兼具传统社会主义国家工会和现代市场经济条件下工会的双重特征。     

中、美工会的比较研究

在市场经济国家中工会作为一支重要的社会力量,在劳动者利益的维护、社会秩序的稳定中发挥着重要的作用。本文通过对中国的工会和美国工会历史和现状的研究,从五个方面比较了美国工会的差异性,这些差异性的比较给我们一些清新的概念,有利于坚持我们的工会制度,同时克服一些不足的地方,争取为维护广大职工的切身利益发挥更大的作用。     

The arms trade game: from laissex-faire to a common defence policy

Multinational arms export control has been the subject of discussionin a variety of fora, from the United Nations through to theWassenaar group of arms producers. It is widely recognised thatfree trade in arms can have negative externalities on nationalsecurity and there are benefits from the international coordinationof controls. However, there has been relatively little economicanalysis of these issues, partly because the market for armsis somewhat unusual. This paper develops a partial equilibriummodel of the international arms market and compares a varietyof possible regimes from laissez-faire at one extreme, to acommon defence policy at the other.     

整合工会资源和条件 推动工资集体协商

工会在工资集体协商中起着保驾护航的作用,工会要担当起这一重大历史使命,就必须整合各种资源和手段,争取更多的话语权。具体而言就是要聚集政治资源和手段;强化组织资源和手段;挖掘工会的法律资源。