The Impact of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures on Market Entry and Trade Flows

In an attempt to disentangle the impact of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures on trade patterns, we use the database on specific trade concerns on SPS measures of the WTO. Estimating various gravity model specifications at the HS4 disaggregated level of trade, we find that aggregated SPS measures constitute obstacles to agricultural and food trade consistently to all exporters. But conditional on market entry, trade flows are positively affected by SPS measures. In addition, we find that SPS measures related to conformity assessment hamper market entry, while SPS measures related to product characteristics increase bilateral trade flows conditional on meeting the standard.     

China,India and the Commodity Boom: Economic and Environmental Implications for Low‐income Countries

The international role of China has risen steadily for two decades – and has become even more important in the current global recession. The growing supply of labour‐intensive manufactured exports from China has been accompanied by a huge expansion in its imports both of raw materials and of skill‐intensive manufactured parts and components. This ‘offshoring’ of intermediates production by a large, labour‐abundant economy has economic and environmental implications for other developing economies. More recently, the rapid expansion of the Indian economy and trade indicates that it too will soon exert similar effects on global markets. We sketch a model showing how the growth of these developing‐country ‘giants’ generates adjustment pressures on other developing economies. We discuss in particular how differences in relative factor endowments of resource‐rich economies can produce quite different outcomes in the context of product fragmentation and expanding commodity trade. We also explore the effects on production, trade, environment and prospects for future growth in resource‐rich economies, particularly in the context of weak institutions and other market failures. We illustrate these different impacts by considering the cases of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand and highlight implications for growth, development and policy.     

Exports and Productivity: A Survey of the Evidence from Firm‐level Data

While the role of exports in promoting growth in general, and productivity in particular, has been investigated empirically using aggregate data for countries and industries for a long time, only recently have comprehensive longitudinal data at the firm level been used to look at the extent and causes of productivity differentials between exporters and their counterparts which sell on the domestic market only. This paper surveys the empirical strategies applied, and the results produced, in 54 microeconometric studies with data from 34 countries that were published between 1995 and 2006. Details aside, exporters are found to be more productive than non‐exporters, and the more productive firms self‐select into export markets, while exporting does not necessarily improve productivity.     

The Performance of Trading Firms in the Services Sectors – Comparable Evidence from Four EU Countries

We examine trade complexity and the implications of adding additional dimensions of trade for firm performance among services producers. We use unique firm‐level data to compare these patterns across four EU countries. Overall, services firms are relatively less engaged in trade than manufacturing firms; they mostly trade goods and are more likely to import than to export. Trade in services is quite rare; services are more likely to be traded by firms already trading goods. Trading firms in the services sectors are significantly larger, more productive and pay higher wages than non‐traders. Two‐way traders outperform one‐way traders. Changes in trading status by either adding another dimension of trade (imports, exports) or another type of product (goods, services) are infrequent and are associated with significant preswitching premia. In contrast, learning effects from switching trading status are uncommon. This points to significant fixed cost of being engaged in trade and confirms some previous findings that trading services firms have similar traits as their manufacturing counterparts. Apart from greater trade participation in smaller countries, we do not observe systematic differences in terms of trade or switching premia between the four countries that might be attributable to differences in country characteristics.     

农产品技术性贸易壁垒影响因素实证分析——以福建农产品出口企业为例

本文实证分析了农产品技术性贸易壁垒(TBT)的影响因素,探究TBT影响农产品出口的运行机制,为政府农产品国际贸易政策的决策提供依据。利用Ordinal Logistic对农产品出口TBT影响因素进行回归分析,结果表明,企业性质、出口渠道与贸易方式对农产品TBT的影响不显著,企业出口额、出口产品种类与出口目的地对农产品TBT的影响显著。在克服农产品出口TBT方面,政府扶持优势农产品及针对不同贸易伙伴进行国际协调政策有其合理性,但对出口龙头企业的扶持可能达不到预期目标。     

Globalisation and Inter‐occupational Inequality: Empirical Evidence from OECD Countries

How does globalisation affect inter‐occupational wage inequality within countries? This paper examines this by focusing on two dimensions of globalisation: openness to trade and openness to capital flows, using a relatively new data set on occupational wages. Estimates from a dynamic model for 15 OECD countries spanning the period 1983–2003 suggest that increased openness increases occupational wage inequality in poorer OECD countries as predicted by the Heckscher–Ohlin–Samuelson model, but for the more advanced OECD countries, we find no significant effect. The absence of the expected result for the latter category can be due to a rapid increase in the supply of skilled labour, to outsourcing of skilled jobs or because changes in the trade flows are too small to have any significant effect in those countries.     

The Impacts of Alignment with Global Product Standards on Exports of Firms in Developing Countries

Complying with global standards and technical norms can be costly, making them potential impediments to trade, but it can also expand export opportunities. Two policies available to governments are alignment of domestic technical regulations with international standards and entry into mutual recognition agreements (MRAs). We study the effects of such decisions on the volume of exports to developed markets by firms in developing countries, using data from a World Bank firm‐level survey of awareness of global product norms. Both standards alignment and MRAs are associated with more exports to developed countries, but only MRAs significantly promote exports. This finding is consistent with theoretical predictions that MRAs should reduce the fixed costs of exporting more than standards alignment, permitting more firms to enter export markets in higher volumes. Governments in developing countries hoping to encourage exports may wish to favour the negotiation of mutual recognition of testing and certification procedures with major trading partners as a more affirmative avenue to expanding international sales.     

The Reorientation of Transition Countries’ Exports: Changes in Quantity, Quality and Variety

Exports from transition countries to market economies have increased considerably since the fall of socialism. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have generally been more successful in this regard than the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. There are also considerable differences between countries within both the CEEC and the CIS, however. The following paper uses a variety of measures to determine the factors behind these cross-country differences.     

The Trade‐Off between Foreign Direct Investments and Exports: The Role of Multiple Dimensions of Distance

To serve foreign markets, firms can either export or set up a local subsidiary through horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI). The conventional proximity–concentration theory suggests that FDI substitutes for trade if distance between countries is large, while exports become more important if scale economies in production are large. This paper investigates empirically the effect of different dimensions of distance on the choice between exports and FDI. We find that different dimensions of distance affect exports and FDI differently. There is clear evidence of a proximity–concentration trade‐off in geographical terms: the share of FDI sales in total foreign sales increases with geographical distance. The positive relation between import tariffs and FDI intensity provides further evidence for a trade‐off resulting from trade costs. On the other hand, the share of FDI decreases with language differences and cultural and institutional barriers. The latter dimensions of distance thus affect FDI more strongly than exports.     

碳边界调节措施对中国出口产品影响评估

虽然2012年后全球温室气体减排机制尚未达成,但各国纷纷制定气候和能源法案以促进减排。为维持国内企业竞争力,防止碳泄露和能源密集型产业转移．部分国家可能会实施单边贸易措施。文章主要结合美国相关法案,作出合理政策假设,利用IPCC氧化碳排放计算方法和投入产出模型,考察潜在碳边界调节措施对中国出口影响。结果发现．中国整体出口受碳成本上升影响有限,但基本钢铁产业、化学制造产业和非矿物制造产业的出口产品受冲击较大。     

Estimation of income elasticities from Lorenz concentration curves: application to Canadian micro‐data

This study uses a method of estimating income elasticities of major Canadian expenditure groups. The technique is based on the implicit Engel functions derived from the Lorenz curve of permanent income and concentration curves of group‐specific expenditures. The methodology is applied to The 1996 Canadian Family Expenditure Survey. Results indicate that income elasticities for the majority of the broad expenditure categories considered in the study are inelastic and they increase monotonically with income.     

Innocent or Not‐so‐innocent Bystanders: Evidence from the Gravity Model of International Trade About the Effects of UN Sanctions on Neighbour Countries

This paper examines two hypotheses about the effects of UN sanctions on trade flows between land neighbours of the target country and the rest of the world. First, there have been claims that sanctions hurt neighbour countries by cutting off trading routes, increasing transportation costs and disrupting established trading ties. We would expect that a neighbour's trade with the rest of the world would fall, as a result. Second, there is extensive evidence that neighbours have been involved in smuggling. Consequently, neighbours should trade more with the rest of the world during UN trade embargoes, because now they also trade on behalf of the target. I employ the gravity model of international trade to show that, overall, a neighbour's trade with the rest of the world tends to fall during UN sanctions episodes. This confirms the first hypothesis above: on a net basis, land neighbours have been ‘innocent bystanders’ hit by UN sanctions.     

A Time‐series Approach to the Feldstein–Horioka Puzzle with Panel Data from the OECD Countries

This paper estimates the Feldstein–Horioka equation from 1960–2007 with a panel of 13 OECD countries with the Pedroni method. It is found that the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle exists in a weaker form. Structural break tests indicated that there was a break in the mid‐1970s or in the early 1990s. These break dates seem to capture the effects of the last decade of the Bretton Woods agreement and the early years of the Maastricht agreement. In the post‐break periods, this relationship is weaker and the saving retention coefficient has declined, implying that capital mobility has increased between these OECD countries. It is likely that these two agreements may have decreased investor uncertainty and improved capital mobility. However, this conclusion should be interpreted cautiously because alternative explanations for the observed correlation between the saving–investment ratios are possible. For example, Byrne et al. (2009) have argued that the observed correlation between investment–saving ratios could be due to common global factors and therefore may not be useful for testing whether capital mobility has decreased or increased.     

Climate Policy‐induced Investments in Developing Countries: The Implications of Investment Risks

1075 (Christoph Böhringer and Andreas Löschel) International climate policy has assigned the leading role in emissions abatement to the industrialised countries while developing countries remain uncommitted to binding emission reduction targets. However, cooperation between the industrialised and the developing world through joint implementation of emission abatement promises substantial economic gains to both parties. In this context, the policy debate on joint implementation has addressed the question of how investment risks to project‐based emission crediting between industrialised countries and developing countries affect the magnitude and distribution of such gains. In our quantitative analysis, we find that the incorporation of country‐specific investment risks induces rather small changes vis‐à‐vis a situation where investment risks are neglected. Only if investors go for high safety of returns is there a noticeable decline in the overall volume of emission crediting and the associated total economic benefits. While the welfare effects of risk incorporation for industrialised countries are unequivocally negative, the implications across developing countries are ambiguous. Whereas low‐risk developing countries attract higher project volumes and benefit from higher effective prices per emission credit compared to a reference scenario without risk, the opposite applies to high‐risk countries. The – politically undesired – shift in comparative advantage of emission abatement against high‐risk, typically least‐developed, countries may become larger if risk‐averse investors perceive large differences in project‐based risks across countries. In this case, only very cheap mitigation projects in high‐risk countries will be realised, driving down the respective country's benefits from emission crediting to the advantage of low‐risk developing countries.     

The Effect of Aggregation Bias: An NTB‐modelling Analysis of Turkey's Agro‐food Trade with the EU

We explore how different data aggregation levels affect the gravity estimates of non‐tariff barriers (NTBs) in the agro‐food sector, and we examine their related impacts on policy simulations of an expansion to the European Union (EU) that would include Turkey. We calculate two sets of ad valorem equivalents (AVEs) of NTBs using the gravity approach to disaggregated and aggregated Central Product Classification data for 15 Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) agro‐food sectors. We find that the AVEs of NTBs vary substantially across products and that using aggregated data primarily results in greater effects of NTBs. In a second step, we incorporate the AVEs of NTBs into the GTAP model to evaluate Turkey's EU membership and conclude that aggregation bias has considerable effects on both the estimation of NTBs and the general equilibrium simulation results. Utilising different data aggregation levels leads to a great variability of trade costs of NTBs and, hence, to misleading trade and welfare effects.     

Tracing the Effects of WTO Accession on Policy‐making in Sovereign States: Preliminary Lessons from the Recent Experience of Transition Countries

We examine in this paper the effects of WTO Accession on policy‐making and institutional reforms in transition countries. This is done by looking at the experience of those transition countries which are already Members of the WTO and/or which have recently acceded. We start by trying to distinguish between effects of accession negotiations and from those which are the results of autonomous policy initiatives. The areas of domestic policy‐making which are considered in the analysis include market access, governance, government budget, structural reforms, trade and investment arrangements with regional partners and macroeconomic management. We find that no precise blueprint of accession conditions can be ascertained and argue that the WTO played a role, albeit not an exclusive one, in the process of liberalisation. We also find that the costs of WTO Accession are not negligible, but that the benefits of WTO Membership are significant in terms of improved, more predictable, market access and its stability, improved governance and a recourse to better economic policies without significant loss to government revenues.     

环境壁垒对我国商品出口的影响及对策

加入世贸组织以后,我国商品的出口更是受到环境壁垒如环境技术标准、环境标志、环境卫生检疫制度、环保法规、环境包装制度等诸多手段的影响.为了突破环境壁垒,政府应发挥"环境外交"的作用,抵制发达国家利用绿色保护而采取歧视政策;优化出口商品结构,积极推进环保产业的发展,开发绿色产品,增强出口商品的竞争力;提高企业环境意识,推行IS014000环境认证,为我国商品进入国外绿色市场创造条件.